Following are words you will rarely see in our DVD reviews: The director’s commentary by Paul Greengrass for “United 93” transforms his artistic work from respectable drama to essential viewing.
Watching his reverent and detailed re-creation of the Sept. 11 hijacking while listening to his erudite voiceover turns “United 93” into a riveting two-hour seminar on recent history and contemporary times. If you want a thought-provoking analysis of what terrorism has done to us, turn off talk radio and take advantage of today’s release of the “United 93” DVD ($29.98).
Greengrass is a British director with a clear affection for American life. Without painting as martyrs the terrorists who crashed the flight into a field in Pennsylvania, killing 40 passengers and crew, he captures the intensity of the hijackers and frames the aftermath with astute observations others have missed.
Greengrass explains why he opened the film with a scene of the four hijackers praying in their motel room near Newark airport early on Sept. 11, mumbling Koran verses in a “medieval religious rapture.” Greengrass already had filmed an opening that took the story all the way back to a bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan, but he cut all that, because the scenes around Newark said what he wanted to say: Sept. 11 was about a clash of modernity vs. medievalism.
All around the four hijackers as they prepare to board United 93 are subtle yet unmistakable signs of modern Western civilization: Cellphones, cars, jets, skyscrapers, televisions.
“What we wanted to convey,” Greengrass says, “was the depth of their piety, their certainty, cut against the conspicuous modernity of the New York skyline. Those are the forces that were in play that day.” Bringing in the 15 other hijackers on the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that day, Greengrass says, “It was a hijacking of a religion by 19 men.”
The meaning of Sept. 11 was those hijackers telling the Islamic world, “See what we can do,” Greengrass says. “See that we are the one true way.”
In 2006, Greengrass adds, that hijacking of religion “continues to this day.”
In real time, “United 93” shows the flight inter-cut with various air traffic control centers’ incomplete understanding of what was happening over the East Coast. It climaxes in the United 93 passenger rebellion, which experts believe was close to retaking control of the plane before the hijackers pointed the jet toward the Pennsylvania soil.
Like any good storyteller, Greengrass sprinkles interesting details among his broader observations. The control room scenes, populated mostly by real air traffic controllers playing themselves, were shot in 45- to 50-minute takes, with only two cameras staggered to allow film canister changes. Constantly ringing phones were live, and were connected to unseen actors playing the other side of the re-created conversation. Both elements allowed tension to build, and the frustrations of limited information to fester.
Mixing everyday people with trained actors led to moments of sublime re-enactment, Greengrass observes, as he watches a shot where a U.S. military controller has tears in her eyes as she tries to relay information to a commander. “The actors stop acting, and the non-actors start to act, and they meet somewhere in the middle.”
As the fight onboard grows chaotically violent, Greengrass describes how the victims’ families were consulted about acceptable levels of violence. (One of the DVD’s extras is an emotional 50-minute documentary of meetings between the actors and the families.)
All the families, Greengrass said, urged as much realism as possible. They shared his idea that modern life cannot be understood without a clear-eyed view of what happened on those four fated jets.
“Everything in the world for the five years since has been driven by what happened in those two hours,” Greengrass says, convincingly.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at mbooth@denverpost.com.
