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To recreate the 90-minute journey of United 93, Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, The Bourne Supremacy) has constructed what he calls a ‘plausible truth’, based on the information he has been able to access: details of flight recordings and from public records, interviews with families of the passengers, with members of the 9/11 Commission, with flight controllers and with military personnel. Mohammed Atta’s written instructions for the mission were, we are told in the production notes, given to the actors cast as the hijackers.
It doesn’t stop there — Greengrass is determined to treat style and content with equal responsibility. Military specialists and air-traffic controllers (we spend some time on the ground as well as in the air), commercial air pilots, flight attendants — all are scattered among the cast of actors. The head of the FAA command centre, Ben Sliney, was cast as himself. He was the man who gave the order that morning to clear American skies of nearly 4,500 aircraft, and here he is in the film doing it again. Among the actors on the aeroplane there are no ‘names’. The passengers are just a collection of ordinary-looking people.
Of course, everyone who goes to see the film will already know how the story ends. This foreknowledge gives rise to an awful and accumulating dread which began, for me, the moment the film made its sombre beginning — in a hotel room in New York, where the hijackers are saying their prayers. Dread was accompanied by, oddly, a ghastly feeling of suspense. Despite knowing the outcome, events still have the power to astonish.
This is partly because the traditional narrative arc of a 90-minute film is, naturally enough, abandoned. It is also because the conflict in the aeroplane seems so genuine. The characters are passionately committed to life (the passengers) or death (the hijackers) and, by shooting long takes, Greengrass seems to have forced his actors to feel desperate, exhausted, enfeebled, terrified, or empowered. We see the hijackers hysterical, aggressive and frightened. We see the passengers at first paralysed by fear, then motivated by an awful knowledge (obtained via a phone call) that ‘the plane is the bomb’.
Even events we have seen before are shocking. Staring at the jagged hole in the north tower is still baffling. The sight of the second plane flying into the south tower is still staggering. In the Newark air-traffic control tower, where they have lost the flight from their screens, someone shouts, ‘I’ve got a primary!’ Through their window they watch the aeroplane bank towards the tower. The stunned silence on screen was matched by a stunned silence in the cinema — in fact, you could have heard a pin drop for the length of the picture.
Dread, tension, suspense, shock — and incredulity. Once below radar, the hijacked aeroplanes simply disappear and cannot be found. This seems amazing, as does the fact that CNN had a camera on the World Trade Center before the military or the air-traffic controllers had any idea of what had occurred. No one can reach the President, or get authority from the Vice-President. The scrambled jet fighters rush out over the Atlantic, in the wrong direction, and have to be recalled.
This is responsible film-making, and the story deserves it. Perhaps all true stories deserve it, but they are rarely treated so sensibly. Any foot-stamping, flag-waving or deliberate tear-jerking would have made United 93 a preposterous vanity, but Greengrass, painstaking in his approach and his method, has created a film which no one will enjoy, but everyone should see. To sit through it, rigid with tension, is a traumatic experience but one that I entirely recommend.
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