Simply Watching

By Andrew Wright

[1] Very little will ever be known about how the hijacking of United 93 took place. We know that four hijackers -- Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed al-Nami, Hamza al-Ghamdi, and Mohand al-Sheri -- forcefully took over the plane at 9:28 A.M. on September 11, 2001. By 9:57, the hostages aboard the flight had learned that they were to be used as a suicidal weapon. At 10:03, United Flight 93 crashed into the earth near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. While we do have the conversations many hostages had with their loved ones, we can never truly know how the passengers spent their terrifying final seconds and minutes. Director Paul Greengrass must be afforded artistic license when presenting these scenes. However, we do have a complete record of the actions of both the FAA and NORAD during the attacks, and I believe that studying and contrasting how Greengrass presents their scenes in United 93 with the historical record and testimony can give us great insight into the message of his movie.

[2] From the historical record, we know that the first signals of distress from the flight came into the Cleveland Center at 9:29 and that the FAA Central Command was informed that they might have a bomb onboard at 9:34. That gave the FAA a period of 29 minutes to act before the flight crashed. However, Greengrass shows very little of the FAA and NORAD during this timeframe. He instead chooses to focus the final 20 minutes of his movie on the passengers aboard the flight and pays little attention to the action/inaction on the ground. Greengrass’s final portrayal of the FAA takes place when Ben Sliney, National Operations Manager for the FAA, gives the order to ground all planes at 9:42 A.M.

[3] Greengrass may have chosen to leave the Command Center out of the last 20 minutes of the movie for several reasons. First, he may have wanted the climax of his film to be solely focused on the struggle of the passengers, both with their internal struggle to come to terms with their inevitable fate and their external struggle against the terrorists. Greengrass could have figured that he could not effectively convey the passengers raw emotions if he continued to flip back and forth between the plane and the FAA Command Center. Second, Greengrass may have decided that he had shown enough of the emotions and confusion of the air traffic controllers in reactions to the hijackings of Flights 11 and 175. He had already shown the process used to identify and pass up the chain-of-command the news that a flight has potentially been hijacked.

[4] Third, Greengrass may not have wanted to portray the FAA in an overly negative light. While no one could have foreseen or prevented the first two planes from hitting their targets, a full 40 minutes after the second plane hit and it was clear that the United States was under attack, the FAA was still slow in updating NORAD, generating conversations such as this at 9:49 A.M., a full 13 minutes after the Cleveland center advised contacting the military,

FAA Headquarters: They're pulling Jeff away to go talk about United 93.
Command Center: Uh, do we want to think about, uh, scrambling aircraft?
FAA Headquarters: Uh, God, I don't know.
Command Center: Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.
FAA Headquarters: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room.

[5] It was not until 10:07, four minutes after Flight 93 crashed, that the North East Air Defense Sector was finally informed that the flight had been hijacked. If Greengrass had shown the air traffic controllers during this time, he would have been forced to show them in an extremely negative and arguably unfair light. After all, these attacks were unprecedented, and every person did the best he or she could given the circumstances.

[6] Just like he did with the passengers and terrorists on United Flight 93, Greengrass showed the FAA and military personal as they actually were. They were regular people who were pressed into extraordinary and confusing circumstances. He presented the events and peoples reactions as closely as he could to how they actually happened. In an interview with Rush Limbaugh, Greengrass says:

You know, the thing about the film from my point of view is, what I wanted to do was to make a film that would tell the story of 9/11. Because that's a pretty good place to start, you know, just try and weave it together, the story of the air traffic control system, the story of the military command centers, the failures of communication between the two, and through the middle of it, this one airplane, with a group of ordinary men and women. There was nothing exceptional about those people.

[7] In his review of United 93, Gavin Smith writes, “its first half is primarily concerned with depicting what went wrong on the ground, offering a riveting and meticulous inside view of the appalled helplessness of those manning the Eastern Seaboard’s air-traffic-control system and the failure of the air defense chain-of-command.” I agree with Smith that Greengrass accomplishes his stated goal; he made a realistic movie portraying the events as realistically as he could. He conveyed raw human emotions without creating the undue controversy that so many people feared at the movie’s release. Anything less would have been a disservice to the heroes that gave their lives for our country on that day. I believe that Roger Ebert summed up Greengrass’s viewpoint the best in his review; he states “He does not exploit, he draws no conclusions, he points no fingers, he avoids human interest and personal dramas and just simply watches.”