9/11.on Film

...The constant repetition of the images of the planes crashing into the buildings had become "gratuitous," a spokesman said...

...The plane is delayed on the ground for 47 minutes before takeoff, and we watch as lead hijacker Ziad Jarrah sits alone in seat 1A in first class while his compatriots sit behind him, waiting for him to act...

...The controller knows the plane has been hijacked and is tracking it as it enters the airspace over New York...

...Greengrass brings us into the control tower at Newark Airport, which has a direct view of South Manhattan ten miles to the East...

...Four people were killed in the takeover of the plane, which would have seemed like small potatoes next to the devastation in New York...

...The masterful new film United 93, the first major Hollywood release about September 11, is reticent as well when it comes to the depictions of the attacks in New York...

...Some of that talk is doubtless due to the same attitude that says Americans can't possibly stomach seeing footage of the crashes, or the buildings falling...

...There's no reason to fear United 93...

...Because the flight was delayed, and the hijacking itself did not take place for another half-hour, Greengrass manages the near-impossible...

...They intend to win...

...Greengrass is presenting the events of that morning in documentary fashion, a cinematic version of what journalists call a "tick-tock"—a minute-byminute re-creation in narrative form...

...Such infantilization is an insult both to Americans, who are perfectly capable of handling such things, and to the memories of those who perished in the attacks, whose public murders are being treated as though they had been quiet and private deaths...

...The atmosphere is thick with confusion...

...It was there and then it's just gone...

...Even if that shockingly small number is misleading—because in the same poll, 27 percent of respondents said Iraq was the most important problem, and many of them surely believe the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror—it still indicates that the events of 9/11 have receded...

...Nobody has the same information at the same time, planes are routinely confused and misidentified, and key personnel are on vacation...

...Greengrass's handling of these historic horrors is pitch-perfect, in part because we are so unused to seeing them close-up...

...footage is kept largely under wraps because of the emotions it might provoke...

...Everything we see is staged, written by Greengrass and performed by actors...

...All we know about the flight comes from the phone calls made by passengers and some bits of discussion in the cockpit that were either transmitted to an air-traffic control center in Cleveland or were recorded by the plane's black box...

...For United 93 is about the plane that was brought down in a Pennsylvania field because the 33 passengers on board figured out that they were being taken on a suicide mission and chose to take matters into their own hands...

...Somehow, these discussions have become weirdly divorced from the reason that Ground Zero even exists...

...United 93 is a masterpiece of a kind...

...They gather information quickly, including word that a third plane has struck the Pentagon...

...We see the passengers, pilots, and flight crew board the plane, eat breakfast, make chit-chat...

...Indeed, the purpose behind censoring the 9/11 images seems to be somewhat different from the one in the immediate aftermath of the attacks...

...Yes, everyone knows about and remembers the hijacking of four planes and the murders of nearly 3,000 civilians in an unprovoked and unprecedented attack...

...In New York, where I live, there are ferocious arguments about the way the rebuilding at Ground Zero has been mishandled—about the designs of the buildings and the street grid and the look, placement, and size of the memorials...

...There's a lot of talk about whether Americans are "ready" to see a movie about 9/11...

...Thus, while the events of 9/11 remain the most important and devastating in recent American history, they have achieved a peculiar invisibility...

...In the film's final 32 minutes, the passengers and crew become, as Green-grass has said, "the first people to live in the post-9/11 world...

...Sixteen minutes elapse on screen between that moment and the one in which writer-director Paul Greengrass shows us the fate of United Airlines Flight 175, following precisely the span of time on the real September 11...

...Not only can we take it, we can also rise to the challenge it presents—both to us, and to those who would treat Americans as though they were hothouse flowers incapable of feeling the "right way" about September 11...

...American Airlines Flight 11 is shown only as a computerized glyph on an air-traffic controller's screen...

...Suddenly, the glyph just vanishes from his screen...

...When Jarrah sits down in the pilot's seat, he tapes a photo of the Capitol to his controls...

...As the movie jumps from Boston Air Traffic Control to the FAA to Newark Airport to Herndon to Otis, Greengrass achieves a staggering level of verisimilitude...

...Someone is trying to protect us from the neurochemical cocktail of grief and rage, sorrow and anger, trauma and vengefulness that even a few minutes' conversation about 9/11 can cause...

...He makes us think that, perhaps, the hijacking we know happened will not, that the panicky Jarrah and his evil crew will fail, that the attempt to take over the plane and land it safely might succeed...

...This extraordinary act of journalistic collusion followed another mysteriously unanimous decision to censor the photographs and moving images of those victims who had chosen to jump to their deaths rather than be burned alive...

...Or, perhaps, some in the media might feel as though the imagery is almost too politicized...

...By starting first with the little glyph and then moving on to the plane in the distance, he brings us back to that morning as most of us experienced it: a shocked phone call, a report on a car radio, worried whispers of a terrorist strike, a hurried move to a television, then the unimaginable news of a second plane hitting the second building, followed a few minutes later by a clear-as-day image of that seminal event...

...In an April CBS News poll, only 6 percent of respondents said terrorism was the most important problem facing the United States...

...They simply decide they must do something, and they know there is a pilot among the passengers who might be able to land the plane...

...And because Greengrass chose circumspection in his portrayal of the Twin Tower attacks, the sudden and shocking violence of the hijacking of United 93 hits us hard...

...He makes us hope...

...It is a riveting examination of an unbearable moment...

...but it's hard to say what kind of masterpiece it is, because there's never been a movie like it before, and there may never be one to compare to it again...

...But among the actors are Ben Sliney, who was running the Federal Aviation Administration's operations room in Herndon, Va., on the morning of September 11, and Major James Fox, who was in charge of the Northeast Air Defense Sector at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod...

...The men who choose to storm the cockpit don't give speeches about their intentions...

...Perhaps because George W. Bush invokes the attacks and their meaning so frequently, leading figures in the media believe the imagery will tend to buttress Bush's arguments, and serve as unpaid advertising for the president's policies...

...The perpetual repetition of the pictures and footage over the course of that first week threatened to make them as familiar as bland wallpaper, or serve as the permanent backdrop for cable-news channel self-promotion...

...They don't intend to die...

...by JOHN PODHORETZ On September 18, 2001, ABC News president David Westin decided that his network would no longer air footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center only a week before...

...But those deaths may have lost some of their sting...

...At the time, these choices seemed tasteful and appropriate...

...Almost immediately, all other networks and news channels adopted the same policy, and ever since, it is only on rare occasions that Americans have been exposed to those indelible images...

...Because the movie reminds us of this, and because it does not seek to wring tears but wants us to have some sense of what might have happened on that plane as it was happening in real time, Greengrass has succeeded in making a movie about September 11 that is both appropriately heartbreaking and quietly triumphant...

...One gets the impression that the video John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic and author of the forthcoming Can She Be Stopped...

...It's gone," the controller says...

...And yet the policy has remained in place to this day, long after there was any risk of the footage's misuse...

...The men in the control room react without reacting, expressionless, unable to process what they've just witnessed...

...We don't know where, exactly, United 93 was headed, but it was surely either the Capitol or the White House...

...And what of the country...

...By doing what they did, Greengrass reminds us, the passengers saved America from political decapitation...

...And in world-historical terms, they do win...

...The people working there are asked if they can see Flight 175 just as, in the distance, the jet sails without hesitation into the South Tower...

...But because of Green-grass's brilliance, the horror of those murders is given its full weight...

...For the central story Greengrass is trying to tell, the reticence and confusion are both essential...

...Flight 11 has just crashed into the North Tower...

...The scenes on board United 93 are, of course, mostly speculative...

...It is Greengrass's speculation that a panicky Jarrah froze, which delayed the hijacking long enough for the passengers to discover from cellphone and AirFone calls that the Twin Towers had been hit and that there were other hijacked planes in the sky...