Over a dinner of General Tso’s chicken from Dragon Palace, Urbaniak regaled me with tales of his latest acting gigs. I pressed him for information regarding the tumescent plot-lines of The Venture Bros, but this line of inquiry, I’m afraid, my friends, is a conversational non-starter. It’s not that Urbaniak is not happy to blab about the most intimate secrets of the Ventureverse, it’s that he doesn’t remember a single thing about the scripts he records. He oftenrecords episodes out of order, and then only pays attention to the scenes he’s actually in, and even then has little idea of the actual shape of an episode. Or, as he puts it, when the show is broadcast he watches it as a first-time viewer. Regarding “ORB,” for instance, he recalls watching it and remembering “Oh yeah, there was some kind of Oscar Wilde thing in one of the episodes, I forgot.” It seems that Urbaniak knows less about the Ventureverse than I do (and I know less about it than, say, anyone at The Mantis-Eye Experiment). Which, now that I think of it, seems utterly appropriate for the actor playing Rusty.

Anyway, United 93 is a swell movie — if you don’t mind holding your breath for two hours. It is about as well-executed as a movie like this — a real-life social drama about highly-charged events of recent history — could be. The writing, shooting, editing and acting are all excellent, creating a suffocating, well-nigh unbearable sense of dread and horror.

I saw United 93 on its opening weekend at the Arclight in Hollywood. The screen was huge, the sound was enveloping, the gritty, naturalistic drama overwhelming. The crowd, while not huge, was large enough. As the movie began, I began to get a sinking feeling — I realized that I had bought a ticket for a ride I didn’t really want to be on. As the drama intensified and intensified, it got to the point where I felt physically ill and short of breath. The movie was too well-made and too compelling to walk out of, but around the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center I suddenly remembered that I didn’t have a good time that day, and wondered about the wisdom of buying a ticket to experience that fear, horror, uncertainty and dread again. Plus, the bulk of the audience in the theater came, apparently, to see those fucking Arabs get it — when the final confrontation occurs in the closing minutes of the movie, there were plenty of shouts of “Kill those bastards!” in the theater.

The ensuing years have given me a little distance on the movie. It is a marvel of execution and feels unbearably “real.”  (Paul Greengrass, in his shooting style, makes Costa-Gavras look like Stanley Kramer.)  It is, structurally, a sophisticated supsense thriller, almost a heist movie with an ensemble cast. Suspense thriller? I should say it’s essentially a non-stop, 111-minute supense sequence. There is not a single moment of breathing room, no letup of suspense, only a steadily-escalating dread and horror that ends in a chaotic exclamation point.

It has all the elements of a crime melodrama. There are the terrorists, who are trying to execute their crime of crashing the plane into the Capitol building, there are the “cops,” the various air-traffic-control folk we see throughout who are trying to “solve the case” in a thicket of conflicting information and bureaucratic snafus (Urbaniak said he expected, and wanted, Walter Matthau to show up and just, you know, deal with things), and there are the passengers, the vigilantes who, pushed to their limit, finally take the law into their own hands. Hell, it’s practically The Dark Knight in that regard.

The suspense of Act I is: oh no, will the terrorists hijack the plane before their cover is blown by the other planes hitting the World Trade Center? There is a runway delay before takeoff, there are the pre-hijacking jitters of the lead terrorist, uncertainty hangs in the air. Weirdly, it puts us into the terrorists’ shoes: we sit there, squirming, ready to scream “Hijack the goddamned plane already, you assholes!” anything to break the steadily-ratcheting tension. The suspense of Act II is: oh no, will the military figure out what’s going on and cut through its red tape before the plane reaches the Capitol? The suspense of Act III is: will the passengers figure out what’s going on, make their stand and save the day?

In the end, the criminals don’t pull of the big job, the vigilantes succeed only in stopping the criminals, and the detectives don’t know there’s even a case until everyone’s dead.  There’s a 21st-century lesson in there somewhere.

The filmmakers, with very few exceptions, avoid sentiment, but still, even though I know the ending when I start the movie, there is a moment mid-way through when I suddenly realize “oh shit — all these people are going to die,” and feel weird about even watching it any more. It’s the whole “how does this qualify as ‘entertainment'” question, the same one I have while watching Schindler’s List. When you watch a Holocaust drama, dammit, you want to see Nazi atrocities, and if those atrocities are elided or prettified, you feel short-changed — they didn’t give me full bang for my Holocaust-drama dollar. Similarly, in a 9/11 drama, dammit, you want to see those planes crash. What else would you be watching the movie for?

(It is indicative of, well, something, that when the second plane hit the WTC, the first thought in every American’s mind was not “oh the humanity” but “my God, it’s just like a movie.”)