"No One is Going to Help Us"

From David Denby's review of United 93 in The New Yorker:

“No one is going to help us. We’ve got to do it ourselves.” Those plain, unarousing words, spoken by a man ordinary in looks but remarkable in perception and courage, are a turning point in United 93 Paul Greengrass's stunning account of how a group of airline passengers, almost certain of death, decided in the morning of September 11th to fight back against hijackers on a suicide mission...

Greengrass’s movie is tightly wrapped, minutely drawn, and, no matter how frightening, superbly precise. In comparison with past Hollywood treatments of Everyman heroism in time of war, such as Hitchcock's hammy Lifeboat, or more recent spectacle , like War of the Worlds, there’s no visual or verbal rhetoric, no swelling awareness of the Menace We All Face. Those movies were guaranteed to raise a lump in our throats. In this retelling of actual events, most of our emotion is centered in the pit of the stomach. The accumulated dread and grief get released when some of the male passengers, shortly after those few words are spoken, rush the hijackers stationed at the front of the plane with the engorged fury of water breaking through a dam...

A fair amount of distaste for this movie has been building in recent weeks. Would the heroic event—which ended when the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard—be exploited in some way? And why do we need to take this death trip? But United 93 is a tremendous experience of fear, bewilderment, and resolution, and, when you replay the movie in your head afterward, you are likely to think that Greengrass made all the right choices...

By the time the plane got off the ground, the attacks on the World Trade Center were only a few minutes away. In the movie, once the flight is aloft Greengrass sticks to real time, and the passing minutes have an almost demonic urgency. This is true existential filmmaking: there is only the next instant, and the one after that, and what are you going to do? Many films whip up tension with cunning and manipulation. As far as possible, this movie plays it straight. A few people made extraordinary use of those tormented minutes, and United 93 fully honors what was original and spontaneous and brave in their refusal to go quietly.

I, for one, reject the Too Soon mentality that United 93 and other 9/11-themed films face and look forward to seeing it this weekend.