Come unanticipate _Flight 93_ with me

At least they didn't use 'let's roll' in the trailer.

Just curious about your source for this Dr Morbius--I watched a Discovery channel show a while ago about flight 93, "The Flight that Fought Back" or something, which strongly suggested that they did, although they didn't play the actual recording. I wouldn't put it past that show to deceive me though, I remember distrusting other aspects of it.

If that's a response to my Neil Young comment, then no... that's a bit harsh even for me. But I am having trouble deciding which is worse: the Neil Young song or this trailer...

"What happened afterward is uncertain but the black box recordings revealed that, contrary to popular belief, the passengers were never able to enter the cockpit. ...

The hijackers themselves appear to have all retreated into the cockpit prior to the charge, and they can be heard praying, reassuring themselves, and discussing on separate occasions, in Arabic, whether to use a fire axe in the cockpit on those outside or to cut off the oxygen to quell the charge. Jarrah said "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?" Another hijacker replied "No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off." Jarrah later said "Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?" to which another hijacker replied "Yes, put it in it, and pull it down." then later "Pull it down! Pull it down!"

The 9/11 Commission found from the recordings that, contrary to what many have believed, the passengers did not succeed in entering the cockpit before the plane crashed. The 9/11 Commission ruled that the actions of the passengers prevented the destruction of the Capitol building or the White House by causing the hijackers to abort the attack on their intended target."

OTMFM, Paul. I agree completely.

yeah god forbid artists influence the way people think about historical events!!

i hope they got that guy from 'crash'

Actually, Mujibur Rahman and Sirajul Islam would be kinda genius.

"Pull it down! Pull it down!"

Greengrass cast people close to their roles. J.J. Johnson, who plays the captain of Flight 93, is a real United pilot. Trish Gates, who plays head flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw, was a real United flight attendant. Ben Sliney, who as national operations manager for the FAA kept track of the mounting atrocities, appears as himself. Lewis Alsamari, who plays one of the hijackers, spent a year in the Iraqi army.

http://tvplex.go.com/buenavista/ebertandroeper/060424.html

"I thought it would be impossible for United 93 to depict such a heartbreaking event without exploiting it, but the movie left me shaken, moved, and filled with respect. This is a great act of filmmaking."

There is a lot of evidence for this -- for one thing, Paul Greengrass, who made Bloody Sunday, writes and directs. I trust him. He apparently took pains to get the permission of every family who had a loved one die in the crash. He cast no name actors, and a lot of real people playing themselves, re-enacting what they did that day. Ebert points out: "United 93 avoids all those cliches where we learn little stories about individual passengers. Nobody is developed, they simply react to the situation."

I may be easily swayed by Ebert, and Ebert himself is sometimes easily swayed, but this sounds very promising.

So... Paul Greengrass.

Yeah, I can't quite unpack that.

'why was this film made?' could be asked of any film.

The question might be should the film be made. But I think that question is better leveled at Cheaper By The Dozen 2.

To be honest, I haven't a clue. I didn't need a studio movie to remind me of the humanity of the thousands who were murdered that day or the thousands who have died in the wars waged in their name. That's one reason why the arguments about whether it's too soon for a film about the attack rings hollow and seriously off the point.

Similarly, Matt Seitz on The 9/11 Show:

http://nypress.com/19/17/news&columns/MattZollerSeitz.cfm

It seems most of the thoughtful naysayers are not objecting on the Too Soon tack, but on emotional pornography grounds.

play on words

flight 93 i mean

The event itself seemed a surreally tragic spectacle in the sense that the basic elements of Hollywood disaster movie plot occured in reality, sobering the culture somewhat to the action movie artiface. So Greengrass orchestrates the motion picture dramatization in a way that fostered a tone of banal realness to heighten the story's overall effect as a thriller, negatting the genre cliches just as the event itself did. The overlap of fiction and reality is interesting.

I honestly can't imagine not wanting to see it though. Some people, such as my sister, never see thrillers or horror films or avoid dark films entirely because they simply care not experience the emotions those genres try to elicit. Perhaps in that case, I could believe somebody when they say they don't want to see "United 93."

But for many people, it seems that saying "I have no desire to see this" has become the thing you're just... supposed to say. As if no one wants to publicly own up to the dark voyeurism of wanting to witness the simulated tragedy. But don't we go to movies to have an intense experience?

What's funny to me is reading these reviews in which critics are trying to find a way to indict the movie FOR making them feel. It's almost as if many critics seem to secretely wish (as in the slate review upthread) that Greengrass went with some gesture of gross propaganda (which they could in turn criticise him for) as opposed to the smart neutrality route he did take. More than anything else. Whay I find most interesting is that the release of the movie has forced the culture to confront the fact that the medium of film is, and always had been, inherently dangerous.

I like the real stuff best.

"The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered on the afternoon of September 13 ... In April 2002, in an unprecedented action, the cockpit voice recorder was played by the FBI to relatives of the victims of the hijackings. Further details were released by the 9/11 Commission in July 2004. ...The 9/11 Commission found from the recordings that, contrary to what many have believed, the passengers did not succeed in entering the cockpit before the plane started its dive. It is more likely that they broke in after it was far too late and the plane was descending vertically at nearly 600 MPH."

LA Daily News: If the movie's ending of the passengers breaching the cockpit door and struggling with controls is not quite how it happened (Greengrass wouldn't have known that when he made the movie), Greengrass nails the spirit of it...

Chicago Reader: One myth it perpetuates is that the passengers succeeded in storming the cockpit before the plane crashed.

But anyway, this is exactly why I don't really want to see this movie. It's pure propaganda, not to mention a terrorism-themed thrill ride. I do plenty of not-forgetting-9/11 as it is. Maybe in 15 or 20 years it will be of some slight interest.

The thrillers I like to watch don't just tastefully recreate a horrible incident. I have no interest in seeing the movie because I won't get the pleasures of a fictional thriller and it sounds like it doesn't transcend Rescue 911 status. I sympathize with the writers who wish he'd gone into propaganda, because they want to understand why he's recreating this. I could understand if a filmmaker did it a couple decades from now, depending on what follows in American history, but with so many people using what happened for political gain, the value of a dry recreation of one aspect seems pretty nil. Fuck "dangerous."

buy the home game and "never forget"

Then again I don't particularly care for "Rescue 911," but "Unsolved Mysteries" remains one of my favorite television shows. The reenactments on UM are more creepy and suspensful than the majority of thrillers I've seen.

Flightplan is definitely better than a cold sore.

I do wonder, like a lot of the posters, er, why it was made, and not in a HOW COULD THEY? IT'S TOO SOON! way. We go to films for any number of purposes, but basic among them is: (a) characters we root for or hiss at; (b) to be manipulated. When the passengers attack the hijackers it was catharsis at its most primal: the hijackers deserve what they get. But was it futile? They still couldn't save themselves (and I'm not going to get into existentialist a-happy-death arguments here).

What do you say about a filmmaker who has no designs on his audience? If anything it's creepy, and makes him a little untrustworthy.

But for me it's specifically because of that absence of any overt "designs on his audience" that I find the film rightly cathartic as a purely cinematic experience. I feel it's actually less problematic and more honest if Greengrass' interest in the material primarily relates to the possbilities of the form of the cinematic thriller itself than if the film is merely a by product of a political thesis point, which could just as well be and likely better communicated via an essay. It results in a more coldly effective mechanism of moving images. If we genuinely appreciate the form, that's what we should want.

Would Eisenstein approve?

I dunno. Even Flaubert had designs and intentions. "Objectivity" and form-as-form grate on me as I age. As history and domestic drama JFK is repellent, but I can accept Oliver Stone's bad taste, especially when it's as juicy as it is here.

Pretty much every review I have read indicates that the exact opposite of both of these things is true. If it's "pure propaganda," what do you suppose it's in service of?

yeah, and i think given greengrass's track record (making a film of "bloody sunday" etc.) it just posed a formal problem for him--how do i make a film of this reality? i mean, i think it's a litlte grotesque that in interviews (such as one i heard on npr last week) he resorts to these high-minded banalities to explain why he made the film. again, i figure it's mostly a formal puzzle that he wanted to solve, and the 9/11 aspect provides it with a patina of importance that, uh, "flightplan" couldn't assume.

as anthony points out i think the filmmakers are proud of the alleged lack of politics in the film, the lack of a point of view, the lack of contextualizing, etc. but what does that leave us with? just a formal problem, really, no more. nothing edifying about the film, nothing instructional, nothing cathartic in any meaningful sense. just an unusually sober (macho by film-school standards) action movie.

still have no idea why anyone would WANT to see this.

I have a lot of problems with intent, but then again, intentions have never troubled me before. Since I wasn't as devastasted by the events of 9-11, revolted immediately by the patriotic banalities offered by the GOP and Democrats, maybe I was more susceptible to Greengrass' brand of non-manipulation.

I'm still assessing my own responses.

Images in motion are unextractable from the historical event just as they are unextractable from the process of human memory or imagination. Certainly Greengrass was engaged with the formal puzzle aspect because any real filmmaker should be, but that doesn't make the experiment somehow inherently anti-humanistic much less inherently meaningless.

Though it has qualities of precision and effectively manipulates the emotions of the audience, no one whose seen it would identify the film as a cold technicians piece; nobody feels auteurist disconnection from the humans in the story. The banal conversation and idiosyncratic behavior details performed by the actors, and supposedly improvised on-set, might actually serve to connect the audience more closely with the humans in the story than any screenwriter's dialogue has in recent memory. Also, the humanizing details in the terrorist characters portrayel made vividly unignorable might serve to wake someone up to the severe complexities of the "war on terrorism" not addressed in the news media that they choose to watch.

Form essentially IS content in the sense that how you frame any shot (and how long the editor lets that shot last) says something about what you're shooting in some way/in many ways. Overall what's being communicated by the filmmakers is The Experience. I think this approach has the potential to reverberate much more than a "here's what I'm doing this very very important and serious film" thesis statement woven into its text ever could.

It is nothing like The Battle of Algiers.

doesn't it give us the distilled essence of drama? in 'executive decision' it's not enough to have just the plane and the bad guys: it also has to have the white house sit room and dissension in the nsc etc etc, they can't just have a battle of wills, there has to be some 'wider meaning'. i think the film (ok, haven't seen but...) would be *more* offensive if it tried to 'contextualize' the attack. imagine stone in 'jfk' mode doing the film.

http://www.jfk-online.com/sutherland.jpg

fixed

fixed

thanks!!

have you forgotten Weeping Vet Cruise? "Penis, penis, BIG FAT FUCKING PENIS!"

omg that is so true  – except in the case of Judgment at Nuremberg.

Time Machine Theater: U93 with the It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World cast on board.

I SAID LET'S ROLL!

Um... not for the squeamish, but very, very well done.

this statement offends me a lot more than someone making a movie about 9/11.

Penn's performance as this eccentric incoherent politician that all the other characters talk of in grave heroic turns seemed way at odds with the stately tone and sweeping music of the trailer, which was full on bordering on "for your consideration" self parody. Perhaps this post belonged in the thread that already exists the film I've just described. Oh well.

Seven minutes more on the ground could have -- had the government been involved earlier and known what was going on with the hijacked flights, perhaps 93 could have been recalled to the ground as soon as Flight 11 hit WTC North Tower. It had only been in the air for four minutes.

this is sort of what i was driving at above. i thought of this comparison as well. both films make me uncomfortable in ways that films very rarely do. they both seem basically exploitative to me. they both attempt to circumvent criticisms like that by being incredibly "sober" and politically noncommittal. they "don't offer answers."

the aesthetic strategies are different--"elephant" was artsy and detached, this seems to be going for a sort of faux-verite You Are There thing--and the films will gather different audiences (and i suspect "flight 93" won't play as well in france as van sant's film did, to say the least). but there's something rotten-seeming about both of them.

And mighta done more biz if they'd called it Airport 2001.