A & E

You do find opinion in editorials, columns and reviews, but even then tempered by accuracy where facts are involved.

Movies are something else. Even the most rigorously conscientious and balanced of documentaries has biases built in by virtue of time and other constraints. What do you include and omit? Whatever you do or don't do, you're manipulating the emphasis and therefore the truth.

Seldom have I felt so conflicted about the "fairness" of a movie as I am about the documentary-like "United 93," which in 111 minutes -- about five of them the closing credits -- attempts to re-create events before and during the fourth of the four catastrophic 9/11 flights, the one that crashed in Shanksville, Somerset County.

Anyone can see that writer-director Paul Greengrass, a 51-year-old native of Surrey, England, is trying to be as even-handed and nonjudgmental as humanly possible in his portrayal of passengers, crew members, air traffic controllers, authorities and -- here's the rub -- hijackers.

We're talking here about a reasonably good movie, a tremendously taut one and even an important one in some respects.

But there's extremely little, and wildly selective, characterization.

The Middle Eastern hijackers are humanized in the darndest way.

I don't object to the fact they're shown to be progressively more nervous before and during the flight and downright frantic once the hijacking and the cold-blooded killing begin. They're not, after all, insouciant villains in a James Bond adventure.

It's morbidly fascinating to watch them awaiting the moment when they trigger the events that will lead to their own suicides and to the murders of the other 40 people aboard -- and with the intent of taking out hundreds more at their unspecified Washington, D.C., target.

What I mind tremendously is the way the film throws its emphasis.

In the first scene, on the morning of their departure for Newark Liberty International Airport, where United Flight 93 originated, the hijackers pray sincerely and ardently, like soldiers marching into battle or police into a riot.

Before and during the hijacking, they repeatedly murmur prayerful aspirations that are methodically translated for us through English subtitles.

"God willing we are going to get there," and so on.

If all of this praying is one small part of a dedicatedly detailed landscape, OK, I'll buy into it as something that definitely or probably happened. Although -- big point here -- how would we know how much they prayed?

Prayer makes them sympathetic because most of us relate to the activity, if in a much different way.

What I mind is that all of this religiosity, a significant subtext of horrific behavior, goes un-matched by (non-) portrayals of the 40 other passengers and crew members. A total of three seconds are given over to a single victim-passenger murmuring, " ... hallowed be Thy name ... "

Excuse me? Maybe few or none of the 40 in 2001 carried, say, a rosary. But consider this: the film's 106 "story" minutes were selected from many, many hours of film shot over a two-month period. Does it make any sense to create an imbalance of emphasis in which the hijackers almost alone anticipate meeting their maker?

A fatal real-life hijacking is not a situation that requires, tolerates or even acceptably balances the audience's sympathies.

Under no circumstances, no way, no how, do the hijackers warrant sympathy. Even to the extent it helps us to understand their psychological makeup and motivation, that balancing of the portrayal must be guarded.

I'm usually sympathetic to films that attempt to depict aspects of history we mightn't have considered -- the art-rescuing Nazi colonel played Paul Scofield in "The Train," for example, or the crew of the German U-boat facing their doom in "Das Boot."

Whatever its shortcomings, "Tora! Tora! Tora!" painstakingly dramatizes the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the American and Japanese vantages, especially as the Japanese officers anticipate the foolhardiness of "awakening a sleeping giant."

But with the exception of that one brief phrase from The Lord's Prayer in "United 93," were the hijackers really, truly and honestly the only God- and afterlife-conscious people aboard that flight?

Or is the balance in this case lopsided and more than a little ludicrous?

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