What other subject is there? What other event is there? Nothing is so important, so inextinguishably mind-boggling as the terrorist kamikaze flights of 9/11. Al-Qaida gave the world a situationist spectacle that dwarfed anything from the conventional workshops of politics and culture. Since then, Hollywood has indirectly registered tremors from Ground Zero, but here is the first feature film to tackle the terrible day head on, and Paul Greengrass has delivered a blazingly powerful and gripping recreation of the fourth abortive hijacking. It is conceived in a docu-style similar to Bloody Sunday, his movie about the 1972 civil rights march in Northern Ireland. He does not use stars or recognisable faces, and many of the characters in the air traffic control scenes are played by the actual participants themselves.
This is an Anti-Titanic for the multiplexes - a real-life disaster movie with no Leo and Kate and no survivors: only terrorists whose emotional lives are relentlessly blank, and heroes with no backstory. Greengrass reconstructs the story of the hijacked plane that failed to reach its target (the Capitol dome in Washington DC) almost certainly owing to a desperate uprising by the passengers themselves, who were aware of the WTC crashes from mobile phone-calls home, and who finally stormed the cabin, where terrorists were flying the plane. With unbearable, claustrophobic severity, Greengrass keeps most of his final act inside the aircraft itself.
The director is able to exploit the remarkable fact that the sequence of events, from the first plane crashing into the World Trade Centre at a quarter to nine, to the fourth plane ditching into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at three minutes past 10, fits with horrible irony inside conventional feature-film length, and he is able to unfold the story in real time. It is at this point that a critic might wish to say: caution, spoilers ahead. But we all know, or think we know, how the story of United 93 comes out, and this is what makes the film such a gutwrenching example of ordeal cinema. When the lights go down, your heart-rate will inexorably start to climb. After about half an hour I was having difficulty breathing. I wasn't the only one. The whole row I was in sounded like an outing of emphysema patients.
Every last tiny detail is drenched with unbearable tension, especially at the very beginning. Every gesture, every look, every innocent greeting, every puzzled exchange of glances over the air-traffic scopes, every panicky call between the civil air authority and the military - it is all amplified, deafeningly, in pure meaning. And the first scenes in which the United 93 passengers enter the plane for their dull, routine early-morning flight are almost unwatchable. These passengers are quite unlike the cross-section of America much mocked in Airplane! - with the singing nun and the cute kid - neither are they vividly drawn individuals with ingeniously imagined present or future interconnections, like the cast of TV's Lost. They are just affluent professionals from pretty much the same caste, with no great interest in each other, and nothing in common except their fate. And all these people are ghosts, all of them dead men and dead women walking. When they are politely asked to pay attention to the "safety" procedures, ordinary pre-9/11 reality all but snaps in two under the weight of historical irony.
But what does happen at the end of the story? In his memorial address, President Bush implied that the passengers committed an act of tragic self-immolation, rather than see the Capitol destroyed. Is that what happened? Greengrass evidently disagrees. In his vision, the passengers have a quixotic idea of using one passenger, a trained pilot, to wrest control and bring the plane down safely to the ground - a Hollywood ending, perhaps. But there is something very un-Hollywood in Greengrass's refusal to confirm that without the passengers' action they would have hit the Capitol. On the contrary, his script shows the terrorists making a miscalculation of their own.
United 93 is growing, in popular legend, into the tragic and redemptive part of the 9/11 story: America's act of Sobibor defiance. It is a myth-making which is growing in parallel with jabbering conspiracy theories that the plane was shot down by US air-force jets and the whole passenger-action story is a cover-up. On that latter point, Greengrass's movie shows us that it is easy to be wise after the event; it is a reminder of how unthinkable 9/11 was, of how all too likely it was that the civil and military authorities would not have mobilised in time, and that any action would indeed have to come from the passengers themselves. The film is at any rate fiercely critical of Bush and Cheney, who are shown being quite unreachable by the authorities, desperate for leadership and guidance.
United 93 does not offer the political or analytical dimension of Antonia Bird and Ronan Bennett's 9/11 docu-drama Hamburg Cell; there is no analysis or explanation. The movie just lives inside that stunned, astonished 90 minutes of horror between one epoch and the next - and there is, to my mind, an overwhelming dramatic justification for simply attempting to face, directly, the terrible moment itself. The film might, I suspect, have to be viewed through an obtuse fog of punditry from those who feel that it is insufficiently anti-Bush. It shouldn't matter. Paul Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have created an intestinally powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. It is the film of the year. I needed to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. So will you.
