Culture: Remembering Courage - Flight 93

Discovery Channel did a documentry, The Flight that Fought Back.

A&E did Flight 93, a made for television movie.

Universal is releasing a feature film, United 93 on April 28.

Time magazine has a review of the soon to be released United 93. From the review, it sounds like a film makers have produced a movie that people are going to need to see more than want to see.

Excerpt:

Says Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mark Bingham, one of the stalwart passengers: "We spent so many hours throwing our trays around and bleeding and screaming and crying and praying, and throwing up and peeing ourselves, and trying to imagine every possibility of what these people were going through. It was an environment where we could go to these deep, dark places. But the saddest thing about it was that finally we could wash off our makeup and come out of those places."

He means that the passengers on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, of course, could not come out; they crashed and died, along with the hijackers, in a field near Shanksville, Pa.
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... United 93, at which Time was given an exclusive first look, is a good movie—taut and implacable—that honors the deeds of the passengers while being fair, if anyone cares, to the hijackers' jihad bravado. (At one point the passengers are heard murmuring the Lord's Prayer while the hijackers whisper their prayers to Allah.) If this is a horror movie, it is an edifying one, a history lesson with the pulse of a world-on-the-line suspense film.
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"At 28 minutes past 9," says Greengrass (director of United 93) of Sept. 11, "none of us were wondering What are we going to do? We were watching telly, wondering What the f___ is going on? The people on United 93 weren't doing that. They were looking at four guys. They knew exactly what was going on." Knowing of the World Trade Center attack, they could surmise that their own flight might be the next weapon.
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Alsamari says he looked at a scene in the film in which he attacks the pilot and co-pilot, "and I had my hand on my mouth. I thought, I can't believe someone could do that. It was like looking at somebody else."

If the actors find United 93 hard to take, what will an audience's reaction be? Many people will certainly feel they're not ready to see the film. And that's fine. But it's honorable and artful as a re-creation of history, and as a film experience it's both unbearable and unmissable.
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"I hope we're not as a society inured to the messages of the movie," says Hoagland (mother of Mark Bingham, a passenger on flight 93). Those messages, of the hijackers' terrible cunning and dedication, the passengers' valor and sacrifice, are both timeless and timely. "I know it's not too soon," she says. "I hope it's not too late."

The events of 9/11 are almost 5 years into past and fading in the blur of our mile a minute lives.

When United 93 opens to the public, I will go to see it. I want to be reminded of the evil humans are capable of and more importantly of the courage of the passengers and crew of Flight 93 in the way they faced evil and death.