Excellent

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2006)

First, my prayers go up for the passengers and the crew and their families who survived them - and for their hijackers. It's the hijackers for whom I feel the sorriest because people who are so twisted by hate need the sorrow more than do the innocents they mass-murdered. The hijackers came from their world of so little love and kindness to mass-murder innocents who came from their worlds of genuine love and kindness. The telling difference between the hate-twisted, nihilist hijackers and the heroic passengers and crew is that in their attempt to save themselves the passengers and crew succeeded in sparing the lives of God knows how many more innocents whom the hijackers, had they flown into their target, would have also mass-murdered.
'United 93' is the most harrowing film I've seen. Its makers relied as far as they possibly could on the documentary record of the event it depicts - on the facts, not on the paranoid, twisted, cynical, bigoted prejudices and predilections - and not on the cheap thrills and frisson of phony righteousness - of conspiracy theorists. Those facts include all that the makers could draw and glean from the tapes of the passengers' and crewmembers' in-flight telephone conversations and the background sounds they included.
Cinematically this is a seamlessly tight, masterly treatment of real-time docu-drama. Top notch in my book.
'United 93' ought to be shown, it ought to be required to be shown, in every American senior high school class. Now and forever.