More Hollywood, more war, and United 93.

United 93 was terrific (the film, not the flight). It shows the morning as it happened. It opens with the terrorists in morning prayer. The first half-hour of the film is very "you are there", very dense. There is very little dialouge in a conventional sense. It's all airline and air traffic control speak, mixed with passengers saying things like "I'll be at the 4 o'clock meeting" or "Can I get a pillow?" or "Yeah. Yeah. Ok, I gotta go." If you turned a camcorder on Logan International today it wouldn't sound too different.

The movie manages to keep you on the edge of your seat watching events unfold that most Americans will have pretty well commited to memory. When a guy in ATC is playing back the tapes to find out if this was a hijacking or not and realizes that someone may have said they have "planes", plural, it's a shocking moment.

The film underlines something about that day. There were only two places where one could believe in terrorists hijacking multiple aircraft (let alone using them as missiles) : the world after September 11th, and at the movies. Right or wrong, our military and ATC was still operating in a 9/10 world. When they learn of a hijacking they did what you did with hijackings then. You sat back and you waited for demands. What else would you do? Shoot them down? Imagine President Clinton authorizing military force against civilian airlines. Or President Reagan. It was unthinkable. I don't think people even now can imagine how unthinkable it was. I think the best achievment of the movie is to show us how unreal all of this was, when it has now become hum-drum everyday fact.

It isn't September 11th all over again. (Somehow I doubt Oliver Stone's World Trade Center will be either.) The movie ends where for many of us September 11th, 2001 began. It's a testament to how lucky we got (and as the movie will show you, some of that "luck" had a substantial body count) because by the time we were up and ready and knew what was going on, it was over. (In my own case it was a literal truth. By the time my phone woke me up with my Dad telling me we were at war the towers were gone, the Pentagon had been hit, and United Airlines flight 93 was down.)

Which leads me to the next part: Hollywood vs. the United States.

This was in the L.A. Times. I got Disney's World War II collection a couple of years ago. It shows that Hollywood was a major part of the war effort. And it was an EFFORT. From what I know of the times, there wasn't a lot of the day to day that wasn't impacted by the war. Today, our biggest impact (unless you are in or know someone in the service) is at the gas pump. (Heh - I'm not sure I'd mind seeing rationing again. We'd cut down on profits to the Big Bad Oil Companies, we'd Save The Planet, and we'd make people aware that we're really fighting a war.)

Why is Hollywood not on our side? What on Earth do they have in common with our enemies? They can accuse the United States of being a thick-headed theocracy at the same time they want us to coddle and understand and tollerate REAL thick headed theocracies! They've come to realize that spitting on returning GIs is bad PR. Support Our Troops and all that. Make movies that show them as doped up killers. Publicize the tollerant opinions of the enemy on the front page of the New York Times (ok, this is bleeding over to the press again) - who needs Tokyo Rose anymore? But dude, Support the Troops. Peace. Word.

I still firmly believe that American airliners will never again be succesfully hijacked. Any attempt would be at best (for the terrorists) another United 93. But there will be other methods. They're just waiting for us to get tired. Osama bin Laden (who gets all the press he wants) has made that very clear from the beginning. So why is Hollywood and our glorious free press (which should be the envy of the world) putting us to sleep?