"United 93" is Dishonest

Instead of following my usual method of reviewing movies, I will just cut to the chase about my opinion of United 93.

I’m still sitting on the couch in the same spot where I just finished watching the movie on DVD. I know the movie came out a while ago and a review now seems anachronistic at best, but if you haven’t seen it you can decide if you still want to or not after you read my review. Or even if you have already seen it, perhaps you can think back and re-evaluate what you felt after watching it way back when.

Here is why I didn’t like United 93.

While the facts of what happened on the plane have to be mostly conjecture since there were no survivors after the terrorists crashed the plane into the ground out of shear hatred, the ‘gaps’ in the tale that writer/director, Paul Greengrass needs to fill in are filled in with a certain neutrality that hides the truth behind the events of 9/11.

Sure, Greengrass may very well have gotten the timeline of events down perfectly, but there is a sterility in United 93 that causes the viewer to be numb to the horror of what the terrorists did that fateful day in 2001.

Greengrass casts very handsome Middle Eastern men to play the part of the four hijackers on United 93. The real terrorists weren’t especially ugly or anything, but they weren’t as handsome as the actors that played them. Casting is a very important part of movie making. The fact that (child molester) Roman Polanski chose a tall, blonde, chiseled actor to play the part of the “good” German soldier who helps our protagonist, the piano playing Szpilman, in 2002’s The Pianist helps us to recognize him as the good guy. Other “mean” German officers were played by short, bald actors like Detlev von Wangenheim. You could make the argument that Greengrass was just looking for good actors that have a likeness to the actual terrorists and this is what he came up with, but to me, there is definitely something to be said about the kindness and professional aura that the terrorist had that seems biased.

We start the movie watching these terrorists go through the routines that devout religious men supposedly go through – prayer, meditation, etc etc. Our experience with these terrorists becomes really sanitized because we’re not exposed to the horror of what they’d done. We never see the horror in the eyes of the citizens of New York as they stare up at the billowing smoke coming out of the North Tower. We don’t see the desperate people jumping out of the 90th story in order to escape from being cooked alive by the intense fuel fire, only to be liquefied on the rooftops of office buildings below. We don’t see that these hijackers are cut from the same mold as the folks that decapitate school girls because they go to a Catholic school instead of a Mosque.

Instead of showing us the evil that these hijackers harbor in their souls, we see them allow flight attendants to tend to the wounded with a very humanitarian compassion. Didn’t these guys just stab a plastic shank into the neck of that middle-aged American in the first place? In the real world, these hijackers would have let the innocent American bleed to death on the cabin floor like some halal butcher’s lambchop. Greengrass allows this scene in order to show us that these terrorists are compassionate people just like us. They are misguided religious zealots, sure, but they only hate us because – what? – because of our foreign policy or something, right?

Greengrass even has a short montage sequence that juxtaposes several passengers-turned-victims praying the Lord’s Prayer as they make peace with their imminent death and the prayers of the terrorist to their Allah. He does this in a fashion that speaks loudly enough that I can’t miss his point: Muslim extremists and Christians alike; you’re all fanatics and your religion has brought this to pass!

As if to further blur the lines between Islam and Christianity, Greengrass goes out of his way to translate the Arabic word spoken as “Allah” into subtitles that read “God”. Allah is the Muslim’s god, and he has a specific name: it’s “Allah”. To translate “Allah” to “God”, with a capital G, is like translating “Jesus Christ” into “the prophet”. The distinction between Allah and God is one that both Christians and Muslims clearer than anything. In fact, if Greengrass had tried to convince the hijackers that their Allah is the same as the Christian God, you’ll likely find yourself blindfolded with knives at your throat. It wouldn’t have cost anything to type the subtitles using “Praise Allah” instead of “Praise God”, but there is a deliberate choice there. The motives are clear.

Additionally, as the movie wears on, viewers get frustrated at the incompetence of the governmental institutions (NORAD, FAA, and the White House) in this time of crisis because the film deliberately highlights the complications and miscommunication that occurs all around the Eastern seaboard as different agencies scramble to figure out what to do. Certainly there will be a certain amount of confusion in a national crisis like what happened on 9/11, but look back to Pearl Harbor. A sneak attack is just that: sneaky! No one in 1941 blamed the US for being unprepared for a sneak attack. We blamed those who were responsible: the sneaky Japanese sneak-attackers! Why, then, must our current pop culturists push blame on America for what happened on 9/11? Why not blame those who perpetrated the murders instead of those who tried to prevent it?

As if blaming ourselves for the attacks and empathizing with the hijackers who attacked us wasn’t enough of a slap in the face, Greengrass deliberately edits the final sequence leading up to flight 93’s collision with the Pennsylvania plains into a ridiculous sequence of misplaced sympathy. Once the passengers decide to take back the flight, they bum rush the terrorists to try to regain control of the plane. The way they are portrayed made them seem like a pack of rabid dogs; bloodthirsty and animalistic. They kill the hijackers by blunt force trauma and breaking necks. They fight and they roar and shove like… well… like a group Muslims protesting Danish Mohammed cartoons. The viewer is manipulated and begins to root for the two surviving hijackers in the cockpit to accomplish their mission. Until you stop and think… wait. What? Accomplish their mission? And inner turmoil ensues.

Greengrass made an outstanding film in United 93. He takes factual events and reasonable speculation and makes a great dramatic piece out of it. The only problem is, he forges an image of 9/11 that doesn’t fit what really happened. We didn’t cause the attacks. They chose to attack us. We weren’t negligent in our defenses. We were ambushed. The passengers of United 93 weren’t just victims and they weren’t a maddening horde. They were heroes who knew that their sacrifice would spare additional American lives.

They paid the ultimate price for protecting their fellow citizens and their memory should not be tainted by a sideways tale that sympathizes with our nation’s current greatest mortal enemy.

And to add insult to injury, Greengrass ends the movie with the words: Dedicated to the memories of all the people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

No, Paul. This movie wasn’t dedicated to all who lost their lives. It was dedicated to the four hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93. The other innocents that died that day don’t want their memories tainted by your crooked tale.