The same wry, bitter joke about United 93 keeps cropping up: we don't need to see it, we know how it ends.
But that's why I watched United 93 in a near-constant state of tension: stomach clenched, fists balled, arms wrapped around myself protectively. Knowing how it ended made every moment leading to that point almost unbearable to watch.
Airport lines, baggage screening, the bustle of an air traffic control center, clear skies. The minutiae of that day unfolding was terrible to see played out in real time, all those details that could have somehow gone differently and maybe averted disaster, at least in our heads. Passengers waiting to board, making cellphone calls, reading the paper, studiously ignoring the people sitting next to them - small things, made incredibly poignant by knowing what comes next. One of the most heartbreaking moments of the film for me came midway, watching the flight attendents serve breakfast. An elderly man looked up and smiled at the flight attendant as she poured him more juice. The innocence of that moment was like a cudgel.
Also like a cudgel: seeing the bewilderment, the helplessness of people on the ground as United 93 tracked the moments of that day - and seeing what they were seeing, on TV and, in the case of Newark air traffic control, across the river. I guess showing the wreckage of the Pentagon, the smoking towers was unavoidable; but in a roomful of people watching onscreen as United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower, you felt it. That impact hit in the audience as people recoiled and gasped in unison. It's hard to be dispassionate about this movie, and what should or should not have been included, but that felt like a bit too much.
It all felt like too much; it all is too much. I still don't think it's "too soon" because I genuinely think that implies that next year or a year after, it would have less impact. Everyone I've spoken to about it (and let's just say that it's quite the topic of conversation these days) remembers that day like it was yesterday, remembers the horror and the fear and the sickening, sickening, sickening sense of loss. No one needs a reminder.
But the thing is, it happened; and if it's going to be remembered beyond those of us who do remember that day, then movies like United 93 will have to be made, joined by other works memorializing September 11th. In that way it has counterparts in Schindler's List, in Platoon, in Saving Private Ryan - films that dramatize events in history that we can't afford to forget.
At least United 93 does that with a minimum of dramatization per se - obviously reconstruction in narrative form requires a certain degree of "interpretation," i.e. filling in the blanks that we can't know (see Melissa Lafsky's summary of the TFF panel on art, history and 9/11). They are the blanks we can imagine, knowing the modus operandi of the hijackers and who they killed first to take over the plane, and they are the blanks we've imagined by wondering what we'd have done. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek relieves me of having to describe it, but I will say that when the hijackers made their move and started the chain of violence, I instictively jerked my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around by body. The guy beside me did so, too.
Note that Greengrass could actually have been much worse about how he showed the violence within the plane (honestly think reading this account of the Flight 93 black box recordings was worse - it is actually more violent than the movie. A warning before you read it, because it's very upsetting).
The tight, controlled hand Greengrass brought to the violence was typical of the entire film - this was a movie made by someone hyperaware of how it might be seen. He wasn't looking to be an auteur, thank God - there were no romantic subplots, no character arcs, no expository devices identifying "characters," not even any sense on who was on the other end of those last phone calls made from the plane (an easy moment to milk for drama, and Greengrass let it go). This was not what you'd expect from a Hollywood studio film, and for that I was relieved.
So yes, it was done well. That doesn't mean I'm glad I saw it - I'm still trying to figure that out. I do know that for the last two days since I saw it it has not been far from my thoughts - images from the film hit me unbidden, causing my stomach to drop out and my fingers to curl. Was it necessary? I don't know. As Zacharek and also Choire Sicha have said, it just felt really terrible, just like it felt then, or while reading an article on the subject (like, for example, this one - same warning applies) or hearing about someone else who had a friend who died. I didn't need to feel that again to prove that I remember.
As the film raced toward its inevitable conclusion, I found myself rooting for the passengers, vainly connecting with their hope even though, yes, I knew the ending. It was terrible to watch, terrible to feel, terrible to relive, even as that bizarre impulse of hope flickered on despite what I knew - I found myself willing the desperate passenger in the cockpit to pull, pull up the throttle and bring the plane up. But of course, that couldn't happen. I knew the damn ending. So that was one more thing to feel horrible about - because the last thing we need is a reason not to have hope.