Maybe it’s pathetic or weird or exploitive or an absolute necessity. TV stations do it all the time. The 10 Commandments (or whatever vanilla Jesus movie they can dig up) for Easter. Saving Private Ryan (or any John Wayne war flick) fills up the cable schedules for Memorial Day weekend. Halloween on Halloween. A Christmas Story or It’s a Wonderful Life around Christmas time. And now it appears we get the parade of 9/11 movies come every September 11th.
For awhile I had issues with this. Not because I felt it was too soon (my feeling is that art is never too soon regardless of the subject). No. It was that almost every film trotted out on TV for 9/11 over the last several years was hackneyed drivel. There have been a few powerful docs on the subject (especially “9/11”). But for the most part, made-for-TV films like “The Flight That Fought Back,” “Flight 93,” “The Path to 9/11” and Oliver Stone’s for all intents and purposes Lifetime channel movie World Trade Center failed miserably at capturing the raw emotion of that day.
Finally.
It’s weird to say something so seemingly shallow (despite this being a column called “The Shallow End”), but United 93 needs to become the one and only unofficial-official 9/11 film.
United 93 topped my list as 2006’s best film. It’s not political. It’s not sentimental. It’s not exploitive. The film is not a lot of things. And by avoiding all the expected movie conventions one would expect from a Hollywood-backed film about United flight 93, director Paul Greengrass delivered an absolutely gutting emotional experience.
I go to films for an emotional experience, whether it be one of joy or sorrow. Some people find it difficult to revisit films that wallop their emotions. Fair enough. Yet, after that day in 2001, the bumper-sticker industry carpeted the nation with superficial slogans to show your fellow travelers that 9/11 affected you enough to deface your SUV. One of the more ubiquitous slogans was “Never Forget.” Watching United 93 is like reliving those events, for better or worse.
If you truly feel that we should never forget the feelings that day stirred, to never let it go numb as the years pass, then perhaps as a nation we should gather and watch United 93 as a yearly reminder of all the fear, horror, sacrifice and heroism that occurred on September 11, 2001. I assure you, it will be a more potent tribute than all the politicians’ rhetoric, moments of silence, and routine nightly news remembrances combined.
