Not as good as Flight 93

Rating: 6/10 (10 September 2009)

This is a very well-meaning and honestly-made film, and I would no doubt of thought very highly of it, had I not first seen the TV movie Flight 93.
Some people seem to think that a TV movie cannot on principle be as good as a cinema film, but, at least in this case, it isn't so.
United 93 fails to make the passengers into real, living individuals. The families did not want them to be named or singled out, out of respect for the rest, but this is to the detriment of film-making. It means that we cannot empathize with them very much.
A very interesting and moving feature of the real-life tragedy was the fact that the passengers were able to phone home during the crisis - something new in the history of hijacking. Flight 93 makes the most of that. This film, though, pares it right down to repeated brief shots of people saying "I love you" and "Just tell them I love them". Here again, I suspect that the families, understandably, had a lot of influence.
The upshot is: see the other film instead.