Bryce Zabel's MOVIE SMACKDOWN!

United 93 (2006) -vs- World Trade Center (2006)

The Day Everything Changed Except Courage

The Smackdown. Both of these 9/11 films were released in 2006 during the run-up to the five-year anniversary of the events of that terrible day. At the time critics kept wringing their hands about whether or not it was too early to tell these stories. Looking back, the better question could easily have been what took so long? Making films is how we increasingly begin to process events like these. It doesn't have to trivialize them or make them less important, although that can be the danger.

We'll use box office stats to name our opponents. With that as the standard, "World Trade Center" becomes our champ with 163-million dollars worldwide. "United 93" comes in as the challenger with only 76-million dollars. But, especially when it comes to material like this, the box office is only a point of reference and nothing more.

Let's say that you have the heart to re-live 9/11 on film with just one of them on this seventh anniversary. Which one should you watch?

The Challenger. The power of "United 93" is simply undeniable. We've all been on airplanes. It could happen to anyone. Today we all know the risks of terrorism. But the passengers on this flight never saw this coming and had mere minutes to decide to be heroes on that fateful morning when their flight left Newark for San Francisco with 33 passengers and seven crew members on board. Writer/director Paul Greengrass tells this like a documentary and it is simply riveting. The camera work here is dynamic -- handheld, jutting into the chaos. The actors are unknown here and, rather than being a drawback, it makes the entire tableau that much more compelling. For most of the film's 111 minutes, the intensity simply cannot be denied.

Deep Impact (1998) -vs- Armageddon (1998)

It's the End of the World as We Know It

The Smackdown.  Ten summers ago, during the Year of Lewinsky, Paramount/DreamWorks got into a game of chicken with Touchstone.  The result was two disaster films about comets that were about to hit the Earth and destroy all life.  I won't tell you how the Earth fared yet, but I can tell you that the point of impact in the theaters was about two months apart.  Talk about operational redundancy!  In any case, the summer of 1998 gave us a cinematic laboratory experiment in how the same story can yield entirely different results.  Having watched these two films back-to-back, here's my take.  10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... we have lift-off...

I've been thinking a lot about this topic a decade later because I'm writing a miniseries for Animal Planet about mass extinction events ("Animal Armageddon") set to air in early 2009, and the latest episode I'm tackling is the one where the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, most of them within a single hellish hour some 65-million years ago. 

In doing this research, I've also come across an excellent article in the June 2008 Atlantic by Gregg Easterbrook, "The Sky Is Falling."  In it, Easterbrook makes the point that scientists are coming to the conclusion that we have vastly underestimated the probability of these cosmic impacts because they have way underestimated how many of these viable "planet killers" are out there in our vicinity.  Here's their video link.

The point is, these two films aren't just hypotheticals.  This kind of extinction level event has happened before and it could happen again -- maybe even on our watch.

In Hollywood, we like to talk about the "log-line" of something, the equivalent of a "TV Guide" listing.  So, before we get into talking about how these two films are different, let's state their similarity in a single log-line that both could share:

• When a "planet-killer" sized comet is discovered to be on an imminent collision course with Earth, an international space effort -- led by the United States -- sets out to deflect the object by setting off nuclear weapons deep inside its core so that it will miss Earth and, therefore, save humanity.

Even though "Deep Impact" was the first in the theaters, for our purposes, we're giving the "Defending Champion" designation to "Armageddon" because it won at the box-office.  "Armageddon" grossed $553-million world-wide to the "Deep Impact" gross of $349-million.  Incredibly, IMDB (the Internet Movie Data Base) has it as a virtual tie with both films scoring a 5.9 out of ten audience rating.  So, let's start with "The Challenger"... "Deep Impact."