I caught the late showing of United 93 this evening. Although I originally thought it was entirely to early to do a 9/11/01 film, I began to think otherwise when I read this editorial by Todd Beamer's father. In fact, I don't think I would have watched the movie without reading his thoughts on it.
The film is exhausting to watch - not in an adreneline pumping way, but in an emotional, "this is a real-life nightmare" sort of way. The chaos had the Air Traffic Control folks getting their best information from CNN. The military was sending up unarmed planes in the wrong direction. In pursuit of accuracy, you never hear a conversation between two people - you're constantly listening to four or five or ten conversations at once and trying to sort out what you need to know.
There were five people in the theater last night. Apparently truth is not selling as well as fiction these days.
2 comments:
"Apparently truth is not selling as well as fiction these days."
Or your first instinct is one shared by many others- that an incident so horrifying and so recent is not something they want to process any time soon.
My thought is that I would rather watch documentary footage of those days rather than a theatrical portrayal, because I can get closer to the truth that way. Once an event is dramatized it carries someone's spin.
Sean - I totally agree with you. It's impossible to dramatize without editorializing. And I've seen most of the documentaries myself, although the line between documentary and editorials is growing blurry. United 93 takes a good number of guesses at things, but nothing like what Oliver Stone did with JFK.
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