W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
POST 9/11 HOLLYWOOD
UNITED 93 (2006)
DVD (region 4)
d. Paul Greengrass; pr. Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Paul Greengrass, Lloyd Levin; scr. Paul Greengrass; ph. Barry Ackroyd; m. John Powell; ed. Clare Douglas, Richard Pearson, Christopher Rouse; cast. J.J. Johnson, Gary Commock, Polly Adams, Opal Alladin, Starla Benford, Trish Gates (111 mins)
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AN EXTRACT FROM:
Situating a Post 9/11 Cinema of Terrorism
On September 11th, 2001, 4 terrorists board United flight 93 bound for Washington.
ORIGINAL POSTER ART
At air traffic control, technicians and military react to the hijacking of planes crashed into the World Trade Center. All planes are ordered grounded nationwide. The terrorists take over the flight, the passengers calling the ground after the incident. Soon, ground control debate shooting the plane down. Eventually the hostages mount a fight back, causing the plane to crash in the woods well short of its Washington target.
United 93 is effectively the first American film about terrorism to emerge post 9-11. Significantly, it focuses on what was reported as a heroic stand by the passengers of flight 93 against the terrorists.
Indeed, the “heroes” of Flight 93 became enshrined in American popular culture as the sole redemptive act of defiance against the terrorist agenda otherwise so spectacularly successful on 9-11. As the first film after 9-11 to deal with terrorism, United 93 carries an enormous responsibility, and the choices it makes are telling. Indeed, United 93 unfolds like a raw docudrama, its authentic sense of pace and documentary-like recreation adding much authenticity. However, the decision to play the material as a docu-drama like recreation of the events of 9-11 eschews the conventions of the terrorist movie pre 9-11 and speaks towards a desire to re-shape the terrorist film sub-genre for a post 9-11 mentality just as the Vietnam War movie had to wait for the national trauma of Vietnam to be over with before re-defining the war movie genre to suit the new conflict and its affect on the American psyche.
TRAILER
The film begins with the terrorists in a hotel room going through their final prayers and rituals: knowing in advance what they will do effectively suggests that the terrorist figure in the re-deployment of the terrorist film as genre is now a personification, indeed even the epitome, of fate. The Muslim prayers and scenes of the terrorists arming themselves suggests that fate – affecting humanity – is in effect a condition motivated by religious zeal. Thus, the film contrasts the Muslim prayers with a billboard reading “God Bless America”, neatly setting up the idea of the fate of the world as the result of theist religious madness. Inter-cutting between terrorists boarding and unsuspecting airline crew establishes the everyday routine of airport travel in an America unprepared for the hostility against it. Indeed, much is made of the way these terrorists move undetected as around them the business and routine of air travel unfolds undeterred. An irony here is that whilst the plane is checked out and prepared in advance through security checks, it is the human element that if unchecked is the real risk here. Attention to authentic sounds, overlapping voices and hand-held in-close camera work brings a spontaneity and immediacy to the film.
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The Re-Configuration of the 1970s Disaster Movie
However, the attention to multi-character drama, terrorism and airline strife unavoidably recalls the disaster movies of the 1970s Airport cycle of films, which saw brief re-definition in the 1990s with the likes of Turbulence and Passenger 57. Indeed, the focus in United 93 is less an assessment of terrorism that the re-creation of America’s trauma on 9-11 in the genre terms of the disaster movie – a trend that Oliver Stone would continue in World Trade Center and which would echo in the destruction of New York by rampaging monster in Cloverfield.
This reconfiguring of the disaster movie to the newfound threat of terrorism essentially attempts to reconfigure the 9-11 trauma within established film genres, in United 93 merging the terrorist film, the docudrama and the disaster movie. Many terrorist films feature thwarted terror actions: but as this is no longer possible in a post 9-11 world, now that there has been a successful terror attack on America’s home soil, post 9-11 terrorist movies spearheaded by United 93 focus on the reactions of people to what is accepted as the inevitability of terrorism. Indeed, it is this quality of “inevitability” that affects and distinguishes all post 9-11 terrorist themed films following United 93.
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Crisis Management as a Post 9/11 Theme
The professionalism and tensions of “disaster management” is thus the premise and theme set up by United 93 causing a re-definition of the terrorist film sub-genre. It offers a cross-section of characterizations revolved around a central disaster before the descending into a re-working of the hostage scenario, which it transplants from the terrorist film proper into its docudrama recreation of disaster.
Terrorist cinema as disaster movie: it was essayed in part as early as Black Sunday but here the generic transference is complete. With Oliver Stone’s subsequent World Trade Center, this is an earnest treatment of a national disaster in terms of disaster management. The political contexts surrounding 9-11 are irrelevant to these docu-drama recreations: tense authenticity under pressure in United 93, unabashed patriotic sentiment in World Trade Center and monster-movie wreckage in Cloverfield, which abstracts 9-11 almost completely just as much as it visually evokes it. Indeed, the telemovie The Hamburg Cell would go into the terrorist mindset surrounding the disaster of 9-11 more so than the disaster itself, offering a humanist and individualized look at terrorism which United 93 downplays in favour of recreating the intensity of national crisis.
It’s almost an hour before the film addresses the in-flight experiences, bringing to them the same docudrama intensity brought to the recreation of crisis management in the film’s prior scenes. The terrorist takeover of the flight recalls the usurpation of the right to self-determination that recurs throughout hostage scenarios in terrorist movies: again, reaction to conflict is as important to the filmmakers as the conflict itself. The heavily religious references in the terrorists’ dialogue underscores their devout determination to destroy – in this film, religious conviction is a monstrous enabler of mass disaster. Yet, United 93 sees the hostage rebellion against the terrorists in terms of the battle for self-determination: only in this rebellion is autonomy against fate’s designs possible. Indeed, discussions of the passengers as they mount their fight back effectively dramatize the central conceit of the hostage drama – the right to self-determination. American heroism in United 93 is the resolve of determined individuals to act together to regain what of their self-determination they can, in so doing thwarting the terrorist agenda and cheating the designs of a cruel fate. Crisis management and decisive adversarial action here are the American survivalist means of combating terrorism’s religious zealots who would put Islam and Allah above collective humanity.
United 93 is “dedicated to the memory of all those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.”
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DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION:
United 93
AMAZON.COM PURCHASE INFORMATION: United 93 (Two-Disc Special Edition)
FURTHER READING
Terrorism in American Cinema: An Analytical Filmography, 1960-2008
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