A noble effort from the filmmakers

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2006)

The opening of "United 93" reminds me immediately of "Paradise now", winner of this year's Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe award. In both cases, we are presented with terrorists (at least some of them) that look deceptively disarming, particularly in the case of the bespectacled leader in "United 93" that can easily pass as a university academic. But then, watching "Paradise now" inevitably leads to moral questions to which there can be no easy answer.
"United 93" is a very different experience. With minimum possible moral judgement, it simply presents the tragic events that lead to the crash of the flight on that fateful morning, drawing the audience into an emotional ride that they are unlikely ever to forget. At the end of the movie, we have a visual image from the cockpit of the plane fast approaching the ground. Then abruptly, everything ends, and the screen goes completely black, with no sound, for maybe half a minute that felt like an eternity. In the show I attended, during that half-minute, you could hear a pin drop, and the theatre was nearly full.
"United 93" captures the tragic events of 911 on two planes (a very reluctant "no pun intended" as this is not meant to be funny). From the macro angle, we see how the undeclared war starts to unfold in front of the people both at Civil Aviation Control and at the Air Force. With the haunting images of 911 firmly branded in our minds through the last 5 years, it is now difficult to empathise with the people who first saw it as a rare and isolated hijacking incident (not of UA93, but another flight). Ironically and probably unintentionally, the most hair-raisingly exciting sequence from the macro scene occurs quite early in the movie, when two flights narrowly avoid a mid-air collision. Later, after the first hijacked aircraft flies into the World Trade Centre, the situation rapidly escalates to such dumbfounding devastation that ordinary sense of excitement no longer has any meaning.
On the micro plane, regular air travellers (even just once or twice a year) in the audience find themselves just all too familiar with the scene of a routine boarding of a flight. But it soon becomes a nightmare as this is UA93, the only of the four hijacked flights in which the terrorist fail in their mission, which is to fly into the White House. This failure is attributable to the courage of the passengers who came to a timely realisation of the situation through telephone contacts with friends and family on the ground, and storm the armed terrorists, resulting in the plane crashing 20 minutes from reaching the White House, killing everyone on board.
Nobody will ever know in detail what exactly happened on UA93. However, with untiring research and unrelenting professionalism, the movie makers meticulously recreated what probably happened and dedicated the film to the passengers who died and their loved ones. We don't know if there was really one moment when there was a glimpse of a chance, when they found that the bomb one of the terrorists strapped on his body was not a real bomb and that one of the passengers might just be able to fly the aircraft. But we are certainly saddened at the thought that they just might have had that chance of survival.