In-Flight Movie

Let’s roll. (Jonathan Olley/Universal)

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More About

• Paul Greengrass
• Hollywood
• Ben Sliney
• War and Conflict
• Terrorism

Like Bloody Sundayand Greengrass’ recent Hollywood foray, The Bourne Supremacy, United 93is an astounding piece of movie craftsmanship, filmed inside a real Boeing 757 — disassembled and rebuilt on the stages of London’s Pinewood Studios — with multiple handheld cameras in long, uninterrupted takes. But technical matters aside, it’s nearly impossible to talk about United 93 in the critical terms that get applied to most movies. The dialogue, largely worked out improvisationally by Greengrass and the cast during a long rehearsal process, consists mostly of chitchat between passengers and crew, the occasional terse exchange between hijackers as they prepare to commandeer the plane and lots of coded jargon spouted by military and aviation officials. (We learn, for example, that a hijacking is known as a “code 7500.”) The actors — almost all of them unfamiliar character actors or nonprofessionals (including several, like Sliney, cast as themselves) — are exceptional only for their lack of exception, their sublime un-actorliness. And if United 93 is a political film, it is one by virtue of omission, by Greengrass’ unwavering refusal to cast the events of September 11 — as so many others have — in convenient terms of good and evil, heroism and cowardice. Rather, as the filmhurtles toward its inevitable conclusion and those aboard flight 93 prepare to take their fateful actions, Greengrass shows us people stripped to their very core, to their elemental survival instinct. In doing so, he restores something that is all too often lost in the transmission of moving pictures, be they those of a Hollywood movie or of the evening news: the felt value of a single human life.

UNITED 93 | Written and directed by PAUL GREENGRASS | Produced by TIM BEVAN, ERIC FELLNER, LLOYD LEVIN and GREENGRASS | Released by Universal | Citywide