Flight 93

I ended up watching this one quite accidentally last night. I am not sure if they are calling it a movie or a documentary - but its a in a way either. They never really go beyond the information available in the public domain - do not speculate on the conspiracy theories that abound (a la Fahrenheit 911) and still convey the intensity remarkable well.

Everyone knows how things went on a chilly Tuesday morning a few years ago in east coast. Hijacked air crafts were turned into actual weapons of mass destruction - which perhaps changed the modern history like no other event. And we all also came to know that while three flights managed to hit their apparent "targets", one - the "United Flight 93" crashed into a Pennsylvania field just minutes away from Washington D.C under somewhat mysterious circumstances. The flight was hijacked - and was probably headed towards some D.C landmark - when apparently the passengers, knowing what is going on all around tried to take back the control of the aircraft. That's is as much we know from the telephonic conversations some passengers had with their families back home. And then the plane went down in a blaze of smoke - leaving only charred debris. Some say it was the passengers who preemptied another suicidal mission. Some say military air crafts gunned it down to protect White House at any cost. And probably we will never know the truth.

I wished it would have gone somewhat into that. It never did. It just created the events of that fateful morning with dramatic visual effects. It never goes beyond the prepared script - but it never needed to. It replays the phone calls of the last minutes with minute details - letting the audience though a range of emotions - from anger to frustration to sheer helplessness. In that sense it succeeds in serving a grim reminder of the terror and showing how ordinary Americans, "united" by the circumstances, desperately tried to prevent another catastrophe. But whether they succeeded or not will remain an open question - but their heroic efforts are the stuff of which folklore's are made of.