Flight 93: the Movie

[a_majoor]

Review in NRO:

http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200601300842.asp

9/11: The MovieA&E’s Flight 93.

There's a moment toward the end of Flight 93 — the new A&E film about 9/11 and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania — when the passengers realize they must make a decision about whether they're going to try to overpower the hijackers. So they do something quintessentially American: They vote.

The entire movie, which premieres tonight at 9 P.M., can be interpreted as a metaphor for the war on terror: The bad guys wield box cutters, invoke the name of Allah, and kill people; the Americans vote, say the Lord's Prayer, and fight back.

You already know how the story ends. For the ordinary people on board Flight 93, it's a horrible ending. But their sacrifice prevented a national catastrophe from turning unknowably worse. I've wondered whether their bravery saved my own life: On the morning of 9/11, I was in NR's Washington office, which is about two blocks from the U.S. Capitol. What if the terrorists were targeting the big white dome? What if they overshot their target by about two blocks? Well, they didn't — and they didn't because a few brave folks stopped them. (On 9/11, Ramesh Ponnuru and I filed this report.)

Tonight's movie is the first in what appears to be a bumper crop of films with 9/11 themes. Another one, also called Flight 93, is scheduled for a theatrical release in April. ABC has plans to air a six-hour mini-series starring Donnie Wahlberg. Oliver Stone is currently filming a movie with Nicolas Cage about a pair of cops who become trapped beneath the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Reign O'er Me, about a man who lost his family on 9/11, will feature Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. 102 Minutes, a book that describes the rush to escape from the Twin Towers, apparently will form the basis of a movie as well.

The A&E film is perhaps a healthy way to begin because it gets a few big things right. First, it doesn't shirk from portraying the hijackers as Islamic radicals. At one point, their leader issues an order to one of his henchmen: "Enough! It is Allah's will. You will fight them." (The words are spoken in Arabic, and they are subtitled.) The filmmakers don't overdo this angle, but I'm going to give them points for simply not ignoring it. They are sure to get piles of hate mail from the sorts of people who would like us to forget the nature of our enemies. It will be a sign that they're doing something right.

Second, the movie doesn't whitewash the faith of the passengers. Todd Beamer (of "let's roll" fame) recites the Lord's Prayer with a Verizon employee who has taken his call. When was the last time you heard the Lord's Prayer uttered in a brand-new movie that airs on a secular TV channel? More points!

Third, we see actual footage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It is virtually impossible to watch the same thing on a news channel because the mainstream media has opted for a blackout of the most potent 9/11 images on the grounds that doing otherwise would be distasteful to the dead and distressing to young viewers. In 2004, Byron York wrote a cover story in National Review about this practice and concluded:

It is far easier to argue that the War on Terror is about oil, or empire, or Halliburton, when you simply don't show what it is really about: the attacks of September 11. Americans won't forget that day. But as it recedes in time, they may lose the visceral feeling they experienced as terrorists struck at the centers of American power and killed 3,000 people. Showing that horrifying video would remind people of just how they felt — and of why the War on Terror goes on.

Once again, I give the filmmakers enormous credit for not pulling punches. They might easily have balked, but they didn't.

So is Flight 93 a good movie? That's hard to say, in part because the events of that day are so familiar and their significance so undiminished. I once visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I can't say I enjoyed the experience, but then again I wasn't supposed to enjoy it. I was supposed to remember it. Watching Flight 93 delivered a similar sensation.

The film, which often feels like a docudrama, is neither great nor awful. There were moments of tension, but it wasn't thrilling in the way of its fictional brethren, airplane-terror movies such as Air Force One and Executive Decision. There were moments of emotion and drama, and a couple of scenes veered close to the treacly territory of the Lifetime channel. I also thought the movie dragged a bit in the second half.

As soon as the passengers resolved to fight back, however, the movie gained a second wind. When the terrorists weren't looking, the Americans filled coffee pots with scalding water and armed themselves with unopened cans of pop (those things must hurt if they bean people in the head). One of them grabbed a fire extinguisher. Another carried a seat cushion like a shield. They turned a beverage cart into a battering ram. My wife commented that they were like little boys who dressed up as knights and used their imaginations to turn mundane objects into weapons of war.

And like knights on white horses, they wound up saving the day, or at least a portion of it. They delivered us from even more evil.

— John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America..

http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200601300842.asp 

     

 

[BetterThanTheBest]

A guy a know taped this movie of TV and I watched it a couple days ago. While it was dragged out and almost boring in parts, I thought it did an excellent job of showing what the situation must have been like for those on board flight 93. It  seemed very realistic, almost as though it was filmed on the actual flight.

 

[Danjanou]

I watched it when it premiered and found it very powerful  and almost hard to watch at times. We will never know what exactly happened on the flight but I'd like to think what they showed was close. Really hard to get to sleep that night.

 

[a_majoor]

The movie will be in general release soon, but the usual moonbat brigade is out already. This piece contains a reconstruction of what had actually happened based on the cockpit flight recorder, a real life preview of the movie, as it were:

http://tks.nationalreview.com/archives/094131.asp

During at least five of the passengers' phone calls, information was shared about the attacks that had occurred earlier that morning at the World Trade Center. Five calls described the intent of passengers and surviving crew members to revolt against the hijackers. According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane. They decided, and acted.

At 9:57, the passenger assault began. Several passengers had terminated phone calls with loved ones in order to join the revolt. One of the callers ended her message as follows: "Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."

The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the passenger assault muffled by the intervening cockpit door. Some family members who listened to the recording report that they can hear the voice of a loved one among the din. We cannot identify whose voices can be heard. But the assault was sustained.

In response, Jarrah immediately began to roll the airplane to the left and right, attempting to knock the passengers off balance. At 9:58:57, Jarrah told another hijacker in the cockpit to block the door. Jarrah continued to roll the airplane sharply left and right, but the assault continued. At 9:59:52, Jarrah changed tactics and pitched the nose of the airplane up and down to disrupt the assault. The recorder captured the sounds of loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and breaking glasses and plates. At 10:00:03, Jarrah stabilized the airplane.

Five seconds later, Jarrah asked, "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?" A hijacker responded, "No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off." The sounds of fighting continued outside the cockpit. Again, Jarrah pitched the nose of the aircraft up and down. At 10:00:26, a passenger in the background said, "In the cockpit. If we don't we'll die!" Sixteen seconds later, a passenger yelled, "Roll it!" Jarrah stopped the violent maneuvers at about 10:01:00 and said, "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!" He then asked another hijacker in the cock-pit, "Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?" to which the other replied, "Yes, put it in it, and pull it down."

The passengers continued their assault and at 10:02:23, a hijacker said, "Pull it down! Pull it down!" The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them. The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right. The airplane rolled onto its back, and one of the hijackers began shouting "Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest." With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C.

Jarrah's objective was to crash his airliner into symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House. He was defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United 93.

 

[a_majoor]

Another review for United 93

http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200604200607.asp

Not Soon Enough
We have to face the ruthlessness of our enemy.

“Too soon!” some New York filmgoers recently yelled after seeing the trailer for United 93, the new movie about the Boeing 757 that crashed September 11, 2001, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When this heart-pounding, gut-twisting picture opens April 28, four years, seven months, and 17 days will have elapsed since 9/11. Is that too soon?

Islamofascists do not know the words “too soon.”

Just 13 months after 9/11, al Qaeda franchisees bombed nightclubs in Bali on October 12, 2002, killing 202 people, including seven Americans.

Exactly two and a half years after 9/11, al Qaeda attacked trains in Madrid, on March 11, 2004, killing 191 commuters.

Nearly three years and 10 months after 9/11, al Qaeda struck yet again, on July 7, 2005, killing 52 on the London Underground and a local bus.

Almost daily, al Qaeda in Iraq blasts Iraqis, Americans, and others through ceaseless acts of stunning viciousness.

United 93 arrives just in time. As we bicker over Donald Rumsfeld’s job security by day and obsess over American Idol by night, writer-director Paul Greengrass offers a harrowing reminder of what’s in play on Earth today.

In a film of devastating emotional power, Greengrass traces that morning’s mounting horrors. This is no PC film crafted by moral relativists in Malibu. As soon as Universal Studios’ logo fades to black, a man quietly prays in Arabic. He holds a small Koran in his palms while sitting atop a motel bed. “It’s time,” one hijacker announces, and their murderous journey begins.

United 93 should bury for good the absurd cliché that violent Muslim zealots are “cowards.” Rather than watch their knees knock together like castanets, the four al Qaeda agents on the doomed flight are focused and ruthless. When a cockpit screen announces, “Two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center,” the al Qaeda agents celebrate. “The brothers have hit the targets,” says pilot Ziad Jarrah. “We’re in control,” replies hijacker Saeed al Ghamdi. “Thanks be to God.”

Behind them, ordinary Americans who had been eating omelets, knitting, and perusing travel guides quickly discern that their plane is a missile, and they mount a plan to retake it.

Though their jet slammed upside down into a field at 580 MPH, United 93’s 44 passengers surely spared many more lives than they sacrificed. They also likely saved the U.S. Capitol, whose photo Jarrah affixes like prey to the airliner’s steering column.

“That final image haunts me — a physical struggle for the controls of a gasoline-fueled 21st-Century flying machine between a band of suicidal religious fanatics and a group of innocents drawn from amongst us all,” Greengrass said. “It’s really, in a way, the struggle for our world today.”

Greengrass uses little known actors and even some real-life air-traffic controllers and military tacticians who were on duty on 9/11. They make the film feel like a documentary, or perhaps a reality TV show captured on celluloid. The cast appears perfectly authentic as they grapple with a growing sense of doom and an increasingly unfathomable challenge.

One performance stands out among many fine ones. Ben Sliney ran the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, from which it coordinated air-traffic controllers’ response to the hijackings. It also quickly grounded some 4,500 aircraft across America. Sliney supervised all this on 9/11, his first day on that job. He is portrayed rivetingly on screen by none other than Ben Sliney himself.

This fine film’s verisimilitude parallels recent, real-world developments.

“Shall we pull it down?” Jarrah asks another hijacker as passengers bang on the cockpit door.

“Yes, put it in it, and pull it down,” the other replies. “Allah is the greatest.”

Those words are on tapes played at the death-penalty trial of al Qaeda agent Zacarias Moussaoui. His Arctic demeanor mirrors the ice-cold evil that runs through the veins of those who have declared war on America and our allies.

“We [Muslims] have to be above you,” the so-called 20th hijacker testified April 13. “You [Americans] have to be subdued.” He added, “No regrets. No remorse,” expressing his hope that 9/11 “happened on the 12th, the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th…every day until we get you.”

Newsday’s John Riley reported a touching anecdote in a story about Moussauoui’s trial. On April 11, Nicholas Hughes — the nephew of the late Kris Hughes, slain in the Twin Towers — wrote his uncle a letter. “Grandma,” Nicholas asked Kris’ mother, Elaine, “how does the postman know what planet to go to?”

Meanwhile, 456 bone slivers were discovered atop the condemned Deutsche Bank building across from Ground Zero — the giant, open wound that shamefully festers where the Twin Towers once soared. These fragments may help identify some of the 1,151 individuals whose survivors have yet to bury their loved ones’ earthly remains.

Also, New Jersey coroner Dr. James Kay has determined that NYPD detective James Zadroga, 34, died from “exposure to toxic fumes and dust” during his 470 hours of rescue and recovery service at Ground Zero, just after the attacks.

“Detective Zadroga was the 24th officer to die as a result of the World Trade Center attack,” Detectives Endowment Association President Michael Paladino told the New York Post’s Murray Weiss and Cathy Burke. “The original 23 died that day, but he died years later.”

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) told the Post that Zadroga’s autopsy “confirms what we’ve long feared: that the death toll from 9/11 is still growing.”

Too soon? This story never stopped.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.

 

[Ashes]

I rented Flight 93 and I enjoyed it. It had me in knots how one girl was talking with her Mom and her Mom was telling the girl she's holding her and she's right there and don't give up. How can you say goodbye to your Daughter and Mom like that is beyond me  :'(. I'm so proud of them for taking down the plane, too bad it didn't end up better. I'm also looking forward to seeing United 93 in the theater shortly.

 

[Nfld Sapper]

It's already out on DVD  ??? thought it just hit theaters a little while ago.

 

[GO!!!]

Great flick, saw it in theatre.

Like the reviewers, I really liked how it identified the hijackers, not as some generic, shrouded lunatic screaming in a foreign language, but as those who walk among us, who look like us, and speak our language (if only in subtitles).

Movies like this put terrorism into it's proper context, something that happens here - where we live, and with people and things familiar to us.

 

[casing]

It's already out on DVD  ??? thought it just hit theaters a little while ago.

People are getting a bit mixed up here, as I was myself when I first saw the trailer for United 93 on the tube.  The television commercial proclaimed that it was the first movie based upon the incident.  This had me scratching my head as I thought I'd already seen it on tv. 

The confusion is the similarity in titles of two different movies covering the same incident.

• Flight 93 was a Fox TV movie that aired just a couple of months before the theatrical version.
• United 93 is the more recent theatrical release, produced by Universal.

 

[Danjanou]

It's already out on DVD  ??? thought it just hit theaters a little while ago.

Casing posted the clarification however for those here in the Centre of the Universe it is out in DVD. I saw the bootleggers over on Spadina Avenue had copies of it right alongside Basic Instinct 2, MI3, and Poseidon when I was in Chinatown on Victoria Day.

 

[KevinB]

Funny no bootleg copies are here in Dirka-Dirkastan ^-^

 

[vonGarvin]

Funny no bootleg copies are here in Dirka-Dirkastan ^-^

I wonder why that is

Keep it real


von Garvin out.


PS: Is that anywhere near Kerblakastan?

 

[snowy]

:'( :'( :'( thats all i can say, excellent movie.