Defiance Under Fire: Paul Greengrass's Harrowing 'United 93' (Review)

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http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/movies/28unit.html">Defiance Under Fire: Paul Greengrass's Harrowing 'United 93':

Without ceremony, credits or introductory music, "United 93" opens with a cluster of Muslim men murmuring prayers in a hotel room. The four are the hijackers later identified by the F.B.I. as Ziad Jarrah (Khalid Abdalla), Saeed al-Ghamdi (Lewis Alsamari), Ahmed al-Haznawi (Omar Berdouni) and Ahmed al-Nami (Jamie Harding). Distinguished by his glasses and heavy black brows that hover over his worried eyes like the silhouette of a flying bird, Jarrah quickly becomes the most important hijacker in Mr. Greengrass's retelling. That's partly because Jarrah will pilot the plane, a photograph of the Capitol building taped to the control yoke, but also because in this recognizably human face we find a screen for whatever emotions we want to project: indecision, fear, regret or something more oblique, unknown.

Much of what happened on the plane remains unknown. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, some 15 minutes after the second plane hit the South Tower a United Airlines flight dispatcher began transmitting alerts to his planes, including United 93, warning pilots to guard against "cockpit intrusion." The message was received by United 93 at 9:24 a.m., three minutes after it had been transmitted. Two minutes later the pilot, Capt. Jason M. Dahl (JJ Johnson), asked for confirmation. Two minutes after that, the hijackers breached the cockpit and gained control of the plane, probably murdering both pilots and a flight attendant. At 10:03 a.m., after passengers tried to break down the cockpit door, United 93 plowed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard....

The problem is that it isn't the ordinariness of the passengers and the crew that most of us remember. What we remember are the accounts of their heroism and Todd Beamer's famous "Let's roll," here movingly uttered by the actor David Alan Basche almost as an aside, and their murder. And this is where writing about "United 93," as a movie, as an entertainment, becomes difficult....