Columnist George Will does more than give “Flight 93” two thumbs up he says it is your civic duty to see the film:
[Writer and director Paul] Greengrass’s scrupulosity is evident in the movie’s conscientious, minimal and minimally speculative departures from the facts about the flight painstakingly assembled for the Sept. 11 commission report. This is emphatically not a ‘docudrama’ like Oliver Stone’s execrable ‘JFK,’ which was ‘history’ as a form of literary looting in which the filmmaker used just enough facts to lend a patina of specious authenticity to tendentious political ax-grinding.
A New York Times story on the ‘politics of heroism’ dealt with the question of whether the movie was ‘inclusive.’
Well, perhaps. ‘United 93’ did violate some egalitarian nicety by suggesting that probably not all the passengers were equally heroic. Amazingly, no one has faulted the movie for ethnic profiling: All the hijackers are portrayed as young, fervently devout Muslim men. Report Greengrass to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
In a movie as spare and restrained as its title, the only excess is the suggestion, itself oblique, that the government response was even more confused than was to be expected. Most government people, like the rest of us, were in the process of having their sense of the possible abruptly and radically enlarged.
Going to see ‘United 93’ is a civic duty because Samuel Johnson was right: People more often need to be reminded than informed. After an astonishing 56 months without a second terrorist attack, this nation perhaps has become dangerously immune to astonishment. The movie may quicken our appreciation of the measures and successes — many of which must remain secret — that have kept would-be killers at bay.
I planned to see it over the weekend but didn’t, I feel a certain dread. Some may avoid the movie entirely because of this dread. A woman who was in New York (and not far from the terrible happenings of Sept. 11) suggests those who appreciate the threat of terrorism but find them unable to attend the film “buy a ticket or two, just to send a message and to Hollywood and the MSM” about the real values of the American mainstream.