Frank Rich, George Will Take Different Views on 'United 93' Film

By: E&P Staff The new movie "United 93" earned plaudits from critics, and even a strong box office (at least in the early going). On Sunday, it got a thumb's down from New York Times columnist Frank Rich and a thumb's up from George Will.

"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."

Rich feels that the Paul Greengrass movie "exploits 9/11" but calls this "business as usual. This is America, for heaven's sake. " In fact, "it's already been preceded by two TV movies about the same flight. The question we should be asking instead is if its message comes too late....

"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....When Americans think about war now, they don't think about the war prompted by what happened on 9/11 so much as the war in Iraq, and when they think about Iraq, they don't say, 'Let's roll!,' they say, 'Let's leave!'

"The administration's blurring of the distinction between Al Qaeda and Saddam threatens to throw out the baby that must survive, the war against Islamic terrorists, with the Iraqi quagmire. Last fall a Pew Research Center survey found that Iraq had driven isolationist sentiment in the United States to its post-Vietnam 1970's high. In a CBS News poll released last week, the percentage of Americans who name terrorism as the nation's 'most important problem' fell to three. Every day we spend in Iraq erodes the war against those who attacked us on 9/11."

Also on Sunday, George Will, in his Washington Post column, hailed the movie and said it was a "civic duty" for American to go see it. He said that director Paul Greengrass had "imported into Hollywood the commodity most foreign to it: good taste."

Why should Americans see it? "After an astonishing 56 months without a second terrorist attack, this nation perhaps has become dangerously immune to astonishment," Will explained.

The message of the movie, he added, is: "We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war's front, because in this war the front can be anywhere."