A Cinephile’s Critiques

Directed by Peter Markle, 2006 (Color, 9:5, Stereo, 85′)
Starring Jeffrey Nordling, Ty Olsson, Brennan Elliott, Colin Glazer, and Kendall Cross

Most of Flight 93 shows people making phone calls while paying little attention to those around them. The movie isn’t, however, a satire of modern America, where everyone seems to spend most of their time in public talking to invisible people on the phone. It is, instead, a dramatization of one of the most traumatic moments in our national history.

It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers would want to play it safe with this subject matter and stick as closely to the known facts as they can. After all, the repercussions of these events are still causing us pain, and most of what we know about what happened on this flight does come from the phone calls the passengers made after they had been hijacked. But playing it so safe prevents us from getting to know what those passengers might have been like and how they may have related to one another while enduring an event so psychotic that it’s a miracle they were able to make sense of it and act before even more lives could be taken.

The film works best when it’s showing us how the people who received the phone calls try to deal with the situation. One passenger’s wife, for instance, calls the authorities and, when she finally gets through, tries to speak to employees so accustomed to rote procedure that they get confused, keep interrupting her, and, repeatedly, pass the call off to some other department. A phone company employee handles a call from another passenger by flipping through her manual of operating procedures to see what the company wants her to do if someone who’s been hijacked for a suicide attack needs someone to talk to.

This is the first of the dramatized accounts of 9/11 to appear, and it seems to answer the question movie makers have been asking. Is it too soon to deal with these events as stories? For these filmmakers, the answer was yes. Caution prevented them from making a good film, instead of just an adequate one. If you’re going to turn part of the most severe terrorist attack in history into a story while memories of it are still in everyones’ minds, you might want to wait until you think you can make it an effective, well-told, story, instead of an average, unimaginative, one.