Scott Amundsen This is a simple, powerful, and uncomfortably in-your-face docudrama about what it might have been like to be aboard United Airlines flight 93. The only one of the four hijacked jets to fail to hit its intended target, UA 93 crashed in a field in Shanksville PA because of the actions of a group of passengers and crew who attempted, unfortunately without success, to take back the plane from the hijackers.Their heroism caused the plane to crash nose first into the ground. They sacrificed themselves because there was nothing else to be done.I was chilled to the bone by this film. It is stark, uncompromising, and to its credit, it does not try to portray the hijackers as subhuman or the passengers as mere victims. Every member of the cast comes across as a complete and fully fleshed out human being.Not for the squeamish, but it is of great historical importance.

cinemajesty Movie Review: "United 93" (2006)Director Paul Greengrass, who takes a particularly-researched, originally-written script on the 9/11-hijacked passenger airplanes after departing from the U.S. American East Coast airports in New York and Boston, using all his directorial powers, gained since a noteworthy "Bloody Sunday" (2002) and an high-end-visceral action-thriller "The Bourne Supremacy" (2004), to capture the continuous following events between 8:30 AM to 12:00PM on that terror-struck day of reckoning, when two of the four plans already crashed into the twin towers of the "World Trade Center" on the island of Manhattan in the State of New York, USA.The documentary-like appearing motion picture captured by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who mimics steadicam-techniques becoming hand-held shots in engaging confrontations between Middle Eastern looking hotel-room-prepared terrorists, who stab two passenger, one in the neck, the other into stomach to put the pool of estranged passenger, armed with their cell-phone to hyper-realistic moments of fear, despair and agony, calling their loved-ones in a certain death situation when the suspense levels already drop to an early occupied cockpit of a hostile takeover without any additional lighting transition dressed airplane interiors by never-seen-any-flight-training terrorists, who in retrospective, when I revisit the picture after twelve years after its first release, scare hardly any "war-on-terror" thriller-indulging audience.Nevertheless, 2007 Academy-Award-nominated director Paul Greengrass, whose Best-Director-nomination got favored over a political more relevant real-life terrorist theme against the story of a 10-year-old girl enduring nightmares in Spanish civil-war (1936-1939) scenarios-created by director Guillermo Del Toro, when "United 93" passenger initiative to fight against the hijacking terrorists, steering the airplane into descent, becomes improperly-build, dramatically late effort in an editorial of just exceeding the 100-Minute-marker, which should have been 85 Minutes, when up to three editors had been needed to assemble a majority of beat-subtracting close-up on close-up cut-aways.Yet this consequently realism-preaching motion picture to utmost-authenticity-playing no-star actors desired creative decisions by producing partners Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan at production company "Working Title", sharing a feeling of a by-stander perspectives in the Flight Control room before the naturally down-beating, discussions-engaging conclusion are history.© 2018 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

Parker Lewis I happened to see United 93 when visiting family in a London rental apartment and given we know the tragic ending, I must admit I didn't think I could be so gripped by United 93. Maybe it's because the director and writer Paul Greengrass is British, we get a non-gung-ho but moving account of this terrorist attack. The cast doesn't have any big Hollywood names, but we still really want them to overpower the terrorists.Even in the final, gripping and horrific scene, I was hoping against hope that the brave passengers managed to land the plane. That's how convincing I thought the acting was. I mean, when I watched the Titanic (the Kate Winslet one), I just felt it was inevitable that the iceberg would prevail, but in United 93 I really thought that just maybe in an alternative universe where Gore won the Miami recount in 2000, the terrorists would be overcome by the heroic Americans.

jhsteel I have just seen this film for the first time, many years after the events that we all remember so clearly. It was shocking, although I knew what to expect. seeing the events of 9/11 unfolding from the perspective of the ground personnel trying to make sense of it all, the sense of urgency and apparently their inability to prevent the hijacked planes reaching their targets. The main focus of the film was on the events on the fourth hijacked plane which crashed in Pennsylvania. No one knows exactly what happened on that plane, but there is enough information available to construct a totally credible sequence of events.it's one of the most tense things I have ever watched and I was aware of my own fear responses kicking in. The performances of everyone involved are impeccable and completely realistic. Paul Greengrass made documentaries before this film and this shows in the filming and the non-sensationalist approach. The dialogue lacks any dramatic stirring speeches or anything we would expect from a conventional action movie. It's all about how ordinary people would react in a terrifying situation where initially they don't know what is happening, and then the reality dawns on them and they attempt to do whatever they can to survive.I was fascinated by the detail of what happened in Air Traffic Control from the first suspicion that something was wrong, to the events that we saw on the news. I assume that these events were recorded and everything really happened. It takes time for people to understand something so awful and so incomprehensible, even those who are highly competent and very experienced. I remember how I felt, listening to the radio and looking at the news coverage in the UK. I was bewildered, but it was a long way from me. For these people it was their responsibility to deal with an unknown threat situation.The power of this film is in its matter-of-fact approach which doesn't make judgements and presents the facts as they are known, in a very dramatic way. I am glad that I was brave enough to finally see it. Well done to everyone involved.