United 93

Finally saw United 93 yesterday, and when it was over a half-filled house sat silently, not moving, not speaking, finally getting up at the end credits and heading for the exit.

Director Paul Greenglass made precisely the correct decision, I think, to cloak the passengers in a kind of semi-anonymity--to, in a sense, make us one of the passengers as long as we were in the cabin. The shock and frustration on the ground--as one plane after another disappears, as F-16s go up unarmed with plans to ram civilian aircraft as the pilots ejected, as fighter pilots take their planes over the Atlantic and have to be called back--mirror the uncertainty and frustration we all felt, as CNN showed images without explanation and the phone lines erupted.

(I slept in that morning. I had watched "Monday Night Football" the previous evening and then gone to bed, so when I awoke my television set to ABC. My first image was a split-screen of the towers and the Pentagon, both aflame. I thought, "We're being attacked." I went to the school where I worked, only to be told classes were cancelled. I went home in a daze, turned on the TV, and eventually came face-to-face with what I was realy doing, which was avoiding calling home. A cousin of mine worked at the Trade Center, as did his sister-and-law, and I couldn't bear to inquire. Finally, at noon, my mother called to tell me that both were safe, albeit by a matter of minutes. Anyway, back to the post.)

The sheer, Hitchcockian suspense of the film had me almost rising to my feet in sheer terror a few time. Greenglass's genius was to underplay, underplay, confident that the moment could speak for itself. There are no shots of panicked loved ones at the other end of those phone lines (this was left to the made-fot-TV movie Flight 93, which went for the relative angle and, while not as good, still stands as a suitable companion to this film). There was so little personal information about each character that I needed to refer to the Flight 93 Heroes' Page to put names to faces and actors. It is impossible to come to a full accounting as to just went on in that cabin, but four men have always stuck in my mind:

Thomas Burnett, by all accounts the first person to piece together what was happening, who from the information his wife provided realized the plane was not going to be landed for ransom or flown to Cuba (remember those days?) but crashed somewhere significant;

Todd Beamer, of "Let's roll" fame (the line is, of course, underplayed here, to marvelous effect);

Jeremy Glick, the former judo champion, who from the best evidence ran point to disarm and disable the "bomb"-carrier;

and Mark Bingham, the rugby star, second in the charge behind Glick.

A few other observations:

1. There is not a big deal made of it, but, in the film, the one passenger the terrorists go out of their way to kill (and thus imperil their mission) is the passenger in first-class most evidently Jewish.

2. Taking the long view, 9/11 proves that, in warfare, the one sure way to attain the element of surprise is to do something that makes absolutely no sense. Pearl Harbor, Tet, the taking of the Tehran embassy, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait--and now this, a (from a strategic standpoint) crazy waste of one's most dedicated and resourceful followers. Our instinctive response to 9/11--unleash the fires of hell on the Taliban and keep up a relentless search for those who would do us harm--has, from a distance of five years, proven to be precisely the recipe.

3. Everytime I hear someone say, "Too soon," my only response is, "Not soon enough."