In the above quote from Paul Greengrass's commentary track from the astonishing United 93, the director eloquently establishes the true raison d'être for the first feature film to deal directly with the events of 9/11, thereby hopefully laying to rest the groundless debate on whether it is 'too soon' for such a film to exist. Besides offering the painful but cathartic process of re-experiencing the trauma of 9/11, the film functions in a way similar to In Cold Blood: through a sensitive depiction that is poetic and realistic in equal measure, it makes events that are intellectually incomprehensible somehow emotionally understandable. By reading the struggle on board of flight 93 into a metaphor for our current political situation, Greengrass succeeds in making the point that this kind of war can only lead to mutual destruction.

Another reason why it is so important for conscientious, intelligent filmmakers to deal with the events of 9/11 in mainstream cinema is to start an effort to reclaim these events from the Bush administration's divisive war rhetoric that has casually usurped them in the past five years. Films like United 93 spark much-needed discussion about that day, its causes, and how we are to make some kind of sense of them, both as individuals and as a society. As painful and unnerving as the film is to watch, we may be thankful for the fact that the first film to deal with this explicitly (after the plethora of genre films - Batman Begins, War of the Worlds, V for Vendetta, Battlestar Galactica - that have 9/11 as their hidden-in-plain-view subtext) is able to handle its subject matter with such passion and such sensitivity.