Reviews of United 93 are starting to come in. GetReligion is commenting on the TIME article, and if you scroll down to the comments you’ll see the links I posted there that refer you to Jeffrey Wells and David Poland.
I’ll probably be linking to the best reviews pretty regularly, since I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether I’ll be seeing it and reviewing it.
At this point, I’m leaning toward avoiding the film. Not because I think it’s an evil thing. I don’t. But personally, I don’t think I want to sit in a theater, with the smell of popcorn, and watch this on a big screen. I don’t think I want to watch the parents who feel they have to show this to their small children in order to impress its importance upon them… because kids don’t can’t process this kind of thing very well, and it’s likely to give them nightmares for years to come. (I know. A DC-8 crashed in Portland when I was a kid, very near my house, and I’ve had nightmares about planes crashing into my house ever since.) Just as I’m glad that Werner Herzog did not include the tape of the grizzly attack in his movie Grizzly Man, I don’t need to see an up-close-and-personal depiction of what happened to be impressed by the Americans’ courage or repulsed by the evil of the attackers. The wounds are still too fresh, and frankly, I want to keep about the business of healing rather than picking the scabs open again.
Terry Mattingly raises some very good questions about how these events will be portrayed. Has the director shied away from portraying the attackers declarations about Allah? Has he been faithful to the details of the 31-minute tape that was played for the jury in the Moussaoui trial this week?
I think it is an interesting comparrison you make to Grizzly Man, and I can see the conenction you’re making…
I agree I don’t want to see this in the theaters, but i could very conceivably seeing myself renting this and watching it in an enviornment I would find appropriate…especially if it is generally well received.
–RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
I will be interested to see how the film is received, critically and comercially. My Hebrew Professor had the opportunity to fly to California a few weeks ago for a special screening with other experts on Middle East issues, and his reaction was difficult to discern. He was interviewed for the DVD extras, so I will most likely wait to see this on DVD. I did get the sense that he thinks it raises some good questions about the clash of Islamic thought with Western thought, but that the answers weren’t always very clear.
When a major studio releases a movie like V for Vendetta, which is (at best) ambiguous about acts of terrorism, I think I have good reason to doubt whether the wounds from 9/11 really are still too fresh to remind ourselves that there truly are people who want to butcher us by the thousand, and that we may have to do really hard things to stop them.
Thanks for posting this Jeffrey. I have that same feeling everytime I return from overseas.
Thanks Jeff, for pointing this article out.