Is "United 93" Exploitive?

Well, I think on this point Frank Rich and I agree. People have been expounding that "this is not a film - it's HISTORY." But it's not. "Flight 93" is a film and the way it's been handled IS exploitive. The government has let us know very little about what happened on that flight (or really, any of the doomed flights on 9-11-01).

From Raw Story:

In his latest column set for Sunday's New York Times, Frank Rich, the former chief drama critic for the paper, slams the movie United 93 for exploiting tragedy and rewriting history, RAW STORY has found.

But Rich concedes that such exploitation is just "business as usual."

"This is America, for heaven's sake," Rich writes.

Also, Rich argues that, despite the movie's flaws, it isn't "too soon" for such a film to be released to the theaters, but, instead, "too late," since it had been preceded by two television movies and the message about the specific background of the hijackers from 9/11 has been "diluted" by the Bush Administration.

"Thanks to the administration's deliberate post-9/11 decision to make the enemy who attacked us interchangeable with the secular fascists of Iraq who did not, the original war on terrorism has been diluted in its execution and robbed of its support from the American public," Rich writes.

Excerpts from Rich's column entitled "Too soon? It's too late for United 93" from Sunday's Times:

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Don't feel guilty if you, like most Americans, have not run or even walked to see "United 93."

The movie that has been almost unanimously acclaimed as a rite of patriotism second only to singing the national anthem in English is clinical to the point of absurdity: It reduces the doomed and brave Americans on board to nameless stick figures with less personality than the passengers in "Airport." Rather than deepening our knowledge of them or their heroism, the movie caps an hour of air-controller nail-biting with a tasteful re-enactment of the grisly end.
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We also practice denial by manufacturing vicarious and symbolic victories at home to compensate for those we are not winning abroad. Two major liberties taken with the known facts in "United 93" -- sequences suggesting that passengers thrashed and possibly killed two of the hijackers and succeeded in entering the cockpit -- are highly cathartic but unsupported by the evidence.

In its way, the Moussaoui prosecution conducted its own Hollywood rewrite by exaggerating the stature of the only person to go to trial for crimes related to Sept. 11.
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