See 𝘜𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 93.

Kent’s Recommended Watch:
Paul Greengrass,
United 93

I use Gmail for lots of reasons, but mostly it’s for the ads. When I used Hotmail or Yahoo or iWon’s email service, I’d get all these obnoxious ads to refinance my mortgage rate or to meet sexy singles. The “meet sexy singles” ads have lately begun to border on pornography—one or two of these ads consist only of a pair of bikini-clad breasts. So much for a woman’s other attributes.

Gmail’s ads are nice and non-obnoxious, and I can actually customize them for things I’m actually interested in, like movies. I get ads for Rotten Tomatoes, a movie site which basically totals up all the movie reviewers on the internet and gives what percentage of them love or hate a movie. I hadn’t even heard of United 93 before this (I don’t watch much TV, so I never saw the TV spots) and suddenly there was an ad for it, plus the percentage of the reviewers who liked it. Coincidentally, 93 percent. But that’s an impressive percentage. So I read some of the reviews, and decided it might be worth $6.50.

United 93 is of course about one of the planes hijacked on 11 September 2001. It was headed for (we think) the Capitol, but before it got out of Pennsylvania airspace the passengers stormed the cabin and caused it to crash.

This is one of those movies which could have been done horribly wrong.

Remember Apollo 13? Now, try applying the screenwriting on that film to United 93. You’d have the sympathetic, heroic captain; the sympathetic, heroic head of the FAA, fighting the evil bureaucrats around him; the sympathetic, heroic military commanders, also fighting the evil bureaucrats around them; the wives and families at home, providing lots of pathos as they say good-bye to their loved ones; blah blah blah. Not only would it not work, it’d be offensive. The only way Ron Howard could get away with it is that nobody died.

Okay, now apply the screenwriting on Titanic. All the terrorist stuff is happening in the background, but what the movie’s really about is the growing romance between a plucky young proletarian from coach and an unhappy bourgeois first-class passenger. In the middle of the four-hour, $400M movie (even though the actual flight lasted maybe an hour), they meet, talk, dance, he does a nude sketch of her, they copulate in an automobile in the luggage compartment, run in slow-motion through the steam, and hold onto the edge of the plane as it plummets into Pennsylvania.

And then there’s Pearl Harbor. Again, mainly about a romance; then they go through the whole terrorist thing. Miraculously they survive, and tack on a happy ending where two of the passengers fly planes into the middle of Afghanistan and crash into their buildings in retaliation.

As you may notice, Hollywood doesn’t have the best track record with bringing historical disasters to the screen.

This one, however, was done right. The director, Paul Greengrass, decided to shoot it like a documentary—the sloppy-cinemetographer Steadicam™ jitteriness and all—and in real time as much as possible. No commentary; no over-dramatization (except there are, as usual, actors who overact); nothing other than what happened. (For the most part; you have to dramatize some things in order to keep the story moving). Many of the parts are even played by the actual people who did them.

There really wasn’t a better way that it could have been done, and I actually have no historical inaccuracies to gripe about, which is rare for me. It’s an intense movie, and it does not have a happy ending. But go see it. It’s excellent.