An emotional experience

Rating: 10/10 (28 April 2006)

Trying not to give out spoilers for this is hard, seeing that if there isn't one person in America that doesn't know at least 60% of the events that happened that day you must have been either drunk or stoned.
You know the inevitable fate of the people on flight 93.
They crash and die.
But the story must be told. There is no time right or wrong because it is timeless.
Have you ever sat down and listened to Ravels symphony Bolero? It starts out with only a whisper of a snare tapping and some cello's laying the foundation by giving you a structured baseline and a key we would call major. At first, there is nothing but base and snare. Then a flute floats through the air with the beginning of the melody. It modulates and takes you into a minor key. Slowly Bolero builds, adding other instruments as it goes along. Each instrument then joins the background as others take the melody. They become harmonies. Then they get loud. By the end, you don't remember so much how it starts, but you are startled when the final crescendo is played and all is quiet again.
At that point you are allowed to breath. Slowly your emotions become your own. Most of us know how everything ended, but how this thing built up inside the few hours that it did makes you stop breathing; stop thinking; stop responding until the crescendo is over.
The theater was void of sound. Not even the people sitting next to me were breathing. Just enough time goes by to remind you that you need to breathe. Some comments are displayed on the screen. I didn't hear the person next to me breath, but I heard the first tear well up in his eye and a brief rustling of cotton from a sleeve in motion. The person on my left slowly expelled a breath, then choked back a sob. The lights came up, and people started moving. Quietly: As if in a wake.
If this film set out to honor the dead, it did so in one of the most deftly defined presentation I have yet to re-experience. I felt no political agenda. I felt numb. A numbness that continued till I was half way home, then I too fell apart.