I went to see United 93 last night at a screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences... (you know... the Oscar people)... and it was almost exactly what I expected it to be, although the experience of watching was more visceral than anything I'd prepared myself for.
Roommate Mike, I think, used the best word to describe how it felt to watch: "Harrowing."
It's not unlike watching "Titanic" in that you know the ship is going to sink, but you sit there regardless hoping it misses the iceberg. As it unspooled, everyone around me got more and more tense, and there was quite a bit of squirming in the seats, and the intensity just kept ratcheting up, tighter and tighter, until finally there was a cathartic moment that was met by a sort of startling outburst from the audience. (I won't tell you what that moment is... you'll know it when it happens.)
In short, it's an amazing and an incredibly moving and emotionally charged film/document/memorial.
To answer the question of: Is it too soon?
I think this question should be rephrased into two separate ones. The first should be: Is it too soon to make this film?
ABSOLUTELY NOT. I know it's been said before but it's true... When you're watching it, you can't help but think over and over again, "this is how it REALLY happened". Paul Greengrass, the director, went to such extraordinary lengths of meticulous research that I think had he waited longer, the film would have suffered for it. Details would have been lost. Memories of events would have become more fictionalized. As Mike said, "I doubt Spielberg felt the need to consult every bombing victim's family when he shot Munich." And does anyone think Pearl Harbor went down the way Michael Bay envisioned it?
The second question should be: Is it too soon to watch this film?
Maybe. I was surprised at myself, actually, a little more than midway through the movie when I was filled with hatred and rage of a strength and purity completely foreign to me and that inner voice in my head was urging the passengers onscreen "Kill them! JUST KILL THEM!!!" I've never felt like that during a movie before.... Hell..., I've just never really felt that before at all.... at least not at such an intensity. (Just to be clear, I don't believe that this was an emotional manifestation of vengeance, but rather a more defensive sort of "kill or be killed" expression.) Because of that reaction, I feel that this is more than a "movie". I've seen plenty of shoot-em-up style Hollywood action films where there's a cabal of Arab terrorists and Arnold or Sly or Bruce pick 'em off and save the day. I've always relegated those villains into a cartoony Boris Badenov category in which they were so "evil" that it was just too easy to "terminate" them without any emotional consequences or reprisals.... But the way the al-Qaeda terrorists were shown in this film; They were solemn, nervous, questioning, terrified. They were just so REAL and so HUMAN... and I wanted them to die.
I think it might be too soon for people to be able to turn off the raw emotions that are still lingering from their own 9/11 experience. After all... here we are, approaching 5 years since the attacks, and as a nation there is no sense of closure or justice in regards to that day. Instead, we have young men and women, who were bolstered by a unified nation in the days and weeks after 9/11 to join the military services en masse in order to "fight back", who were hoodwinked by the Bush Administration and sent to Iraq.
Maybe that's why the movie was so powerful to me last night. Those passengers on the plane were actually fighting the right enemy. Until we as a nation finish doing the same, maybe it will always be "too soon".
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