United 93 (2006)

Director:

Paul Greengrass

Writer (WGA):

Paul Greengrass (written by)

Release Date:

28 April 2006 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | History

Tagline:

September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked. Three of them reached their target. This is the story of the fourth.

Plot:

A real time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot.

Plot Keywords:

Passenger | Flight | Terrorist | September 11 2001 | Hijacker

Awards:

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 21 wins & 17 nominations

Cast

J.J. Johnson	...	Captain Jason Dahl
Gary Commock	...	First Officer LeRoy Homer
Polly Adams	...	Deborah Welsh
Opal Alladin	...	CeeCee Lyles
Starla Benford	...	Wanda Anita Green
Trish Gates	...	Sandra Bradshaw
Nancy McDoniel	...	Lorraine G. Bay
David Alan Basche	...	Todd Beamer
Richard Bekins	...	William Joseph Cashman
Susan Blommaert	...	Jane Folger
Ray Charleson	...	Joseph DeLuca
Christian Clemenson	...	Thomas E. Burnett, Jr.
Liza Colón-Zayas	...	Waleska Martinez
Lorna Dallas	...	Linda Gronlund
Denny Dillon	...	Colleen Fraser

Also Known As:

Flight 93 (USA) (working title)
United 93 (USA)
Vol 93 (France)

MPAA:

Rated R for language, and some intense sequences of terror and violence (appeal planned).

Runtime:

111 min

Country:

France | UK | USA

Language:

English | Arabic | German

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | SDDS | Dolby Digital

Certification:

UK:15 | Finland:K-15 | USA:R (certificate #41676) | Germany:12 | Ireland:15A | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) | Italy:T | Singapore:M18 | Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:14A (Alberta/British Columbia/Manitoba/Ontario) | Hong Kong:IIA | Sweden:15 | Norway:15 | Argentina:13 | Philippines:R-13 | Malaysia:(Banned) | Australia:M | Iceland:14 | Portugal:M/12 | Denmark:15 | South Korea:15 | Spain:13 | Brazil:14

Filming Locations:

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Company:

Universal Pictures

Trivia:

To make the movie as authentic as possible, director Paul Greengrass cast a number of real-life participants in the events of September 11, 2001 to play themselves. The principal "real-life role" in the movie is Ben Sliney, the FAA's National Operations Manager, who made the decision on 9/11 to shut down all air traffic operations in the United States. Sliney had just been promoted to the National Operations Manager position, and September 11, 2001 was his first day on the job. (This explains why he receives applause from the FAA flight monitors when he walks into the control center in Herndon, VA, at the beginning of the movie.) Several officials who were with Sliney in the FAA control room on 9/11 play themselves (including Tobin Miller, Rich Sullivan, and Tony Smith). In the scenes at Newark Airport, several air traffic controllers who were in the Newark control tower on 9/11, and who witnessed the air attacks on the World Trade Center, play themselves. In the scenes at the air traffic monitoring centers in Boston, New York, and Cleveland, the air traffic monitors are all played by real-life air traffic controllers, including several who were at these locations on 9/11, and who monitored the hijacked flights. In the scenes at the Northeast Air Defense Command Center (NEADS) in Rome, NY, most of the military personnel are played by real-life military air traffic controllers, including several people (notably Major James Fox) who were at NEADS on 9/11. Also, on United Flight 93, the actors playing the pilots in the movie are real-life airline pilots, and the stewardesses are played by real airline stewardesses, some of whom actually work for United Airlines.

Goofs:

Crew or equipment visible: During the final scene of the movie, where the cabin is inverted upside down and the oxygen masks eject from the ceiling, you can clearly see that some of the cabin ceiling panels are missing and you see tubes and wires in light blue and red colors revealing the set.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Ahmed Al Haznawi: [subtitled Arabic] Ziad. It's time.

Movie Connections:

Spoofed in United 300 (2007)

Devastating, Relentless and Ultimately Cathartic…Essential Viewing. Period.

A most cathartic experience came over me when I viewed the much publicized "United 93". At once speculative and realistic, the 111-minute film will surely bring back the pall of fatalistic inevitability one feels about 9/11, but its more defining characteristic is revealing the untapped heroism and humanism of people caught in the most malevolent of circumstances. Masterfully written and directed by Paul Greengrass, this relentlessly intense movie covers that fateful morning when United Airlines Flight 93 departed Newark for San Francisco with 33 passengers and seven crew members on board.

As it turns out, Greengrass's heavy background in documentaries turns out to be a blessing in this treatment, as he tracks the subsequent events in real time and uses either under-the-radar actors or actual aviation personnel to play the real-life characters. Instead of focusing on the higher profile passengers to provide an emotional locus, which a more commercial filmmaker would have done, he encompasses all the passengers within the emotional purview of the film, including the four hijackers who killed the pilots and took control of the plane. The key dramatic difference is that we get to know not the people but the situation at hand. Consequently, we get a more realistic sense of the scale of the events that may have occurred on that flight. That's not to say it is any less devastating. In fact, the last half-hour is harrowing in the most personal sense as the inevitable becomes reality.

The power of the film comes from its surprisingly apolitical perspective and the inclusion of the ground personnel trying to comprehend the scope of all the redirected planes that day, in particular, Ben Sliney who effectively plays himself that day, the just-promoted supervisor of the National Air Traffic Control Center in Herndon, Va. None of the actors stand out because the film cumulatively achieves a verisimilitude that simply knocks me out. The film also does not pretend to be the definitive version of what happened on the last few moments of the flight. In an emotional sense, it is rather moot as we are talking about degrees of detail at that point. This is truly essential viewing.