The lives of the crew and passengers of United Flight 93 were extinguished when the Boeing 757 in which they were traveling plowed into Pennsylvania farmland on September 11, 2001. United 93 pays them apt tribute.
This film takes a different approach than A&E’s Flight 93—released almost simultaneously—and is in my judgment the better of two fine films. The dizzying flight from one civilian and military group trying to make sense of the incomprehensible and fast-moving events of that autumn morning helps the viewer feel in his marrow the sheer confusion that reigned. I do not think that confusion should be mistaken for incompetence in a nation unaccustomed to attacks on its own soil, and this film arguably allows the facts to stand without damning interpretation.
It is horrifying to watch the passengers’ reconstructed predicament on the plane, and Flight 93 does not avert its gaze from the fact that not all passengers might have agreed with the plan to take aircraft back. I am still shaking minutes after the film’s conclusion, which starkly mimics the stubbornness of impact.
I find the juxtaposition of doomed victims praying the Lord’s Prayer minutes before their death with the recitation of Koranic verse by the murderers who killed them unhelpful, but perhaps this bit of poetic license was not–as it might appear–intended to suggest a moral equivalence between those two very different acts of faith.
More horrifying than the A&E project, this film should be seen but younger viewers are not likely to benefit from the horror it so movingly portrays.
One might, I suppose, pick up this DVD for voyeuristic purposes. Alternatively, it is a good thing for one hundred twenty minutes to stare evil and innocence in the face, to distinguish clearly between the two, and then to return to real life to live out one’s choice.
Canter Bridge 
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