"United 93" offers powerful re-creation

By RENE RODRIGUEZ
MIAMI HERALD
Director Paul Greengrass has heard all about the "Is it too soon?" question hanging over his film "United 93," the first Hollywood studio movie to revisit the events of Sept. 11.
"That is just code for 'I don't want to talk about it,'" the British filmmaker says. "But we have to talk about it. It's there. It's the elephant in the corner of the room."
"In the face of tragedy, it's a human instinct to be silent and alone. That's a necessary response. But the other response to tragedy is always -- at the right time, eventually -- that we begin to seek solace, comfort and wisdom by talking to each other about what has occurred.
"Given that so much has followed 9/11, it seems to me now is the time."
Whether or not moviegoers agree -- and at least judging by the vociferously negative reaction some audience members have had to the film's trailer, not all of them will -- "United 93" will open in theaters on Friday.
Made with the cooperation of most of the surviving family members of the 33 passengers and seven crew members of the doomed flight, and using actual pilots, flight attendants and air-traffic controllers alongside professional actors, the movie presents a minute-by-minute re-enactment of the events aboard the plane, which was taken over by four terrorists Sept. 11, 2001, and crashed in a deserted field near Shanksville in Somerset County, Pa., after the passengers rose up against the hijackers.
Disturbing re-creation
Cutting back and forth between the flight and air traffic controllers reacting to the events of that morning, "United 93" is undeniably a disturbing, upsetting experience. But it is also a thoughtful, challenging and profoundly moving one, too -- an unblinking, visceral re-creation of a horrifying day that attempts to bring perspective and hindsight to an event that altered the course of world history.
Greengrass, the director of several socially and politically themed films and documentaries (including 2002's "Bloody Sunday," about the 1972 Irish civil rights protest march that turned deadly), had actually contemplated making a 9/11 movie in 2003, but decided to wait until the ongoing 9/11 Commission finished its investigation.
So instead, Greengrass made his Hollywood debut with a much lighter project: The 2004 Matt Damon thriller "The Bourne Supremacy." Ironically, the 9/11 Commission Report was published the day before "Supremacy" hit theaters, and Greengrass immediately turned his attention back to Sept. 11, using the exhaustive, 568-page book as an authoritative source.
The resulting film, made for "just under $20 million," takes a few creative liberties and imagines how some events beyond the report's purview might have played out. But for the most part, "United 93" is a scrupulously researched and factual film, right down to the clothes the passengers on the plane wore that day. It is undeniably a work of fiction, performed by actors on soundstages, but one that still feels more like an artful documentary than a traditional movie.
'World Trade Center' film
That same respectful adherence to the facts marks Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," a drama about the rescue of two New York City Port Authority police officers (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) from the rubble of the Twin Towers.
The movie, which opens Aug. 9, is based directly on the actual experiences of the two men, Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer William J. Jimeno, as well as their wives, Donna McLoughlin and Allison Jimeno, who waited anxiously at home to find out whether their husbands had survived.
The theatrical trailer for "World Trade Center," which will premiere on May 19 in theaters showing "The Da Vinci Code," gives a sense of the film's enormous scope and contains a couple of brief, chilling images (like the shadow of a plane flitting across a New York City street, clearly flying much too close to the ground). But the trailer also suggests the movie will be a straight-up, almost conventional story of heroism, using the police officers' experiences as a pathway for negotiating the terror of that morning.
Why being factual matters
It is not a coincidence that both "United 93" and "World Trade Center" rely so heavily on firsthand accounts. In order to avoid cries of exploitation or profiteering, any 9/11-theme movie made within the studio system is practically required to double as a historical document to justify its existence.
By sticking to actual events, these movies circumvent the understandable criticism of ghoulish entertainment -- of feeding off unthinkable tragedy for the sake of a buck.
Universal Pictures is even donating 10 percent of box office receipts from "United 93's" opening weekend to The Families of Flight 93 (www.honorflight93.org), a not-for-profit organization establishing a memorial monument at the site where the plane crashed.