aul Greengrass has poked a sensitive nerve in his re-examination the nightmarish fate of United Airlines’ Flight 93, which departed Newark on the morning of Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001 to its fatal date with destiny. The film draws mixed feelings and raises hefty questions about dramatizing tragedies for entertainment purposes.

Is the movie too much? Is it too soon? Perhaps. At least with this film and with Greengrass's real-time dramatization. As an audience, we know there's nothing we can do, yet we still want it to end. Instead, by sticking as closely to the facts as possible, the film makes little attempt to assign blame for anything that happened, except to the hijackers, and even they are shown as humans, not fiends.

September 11 was an ordinary day in every respect. Great weather with fall in the air, four thousand plus planes in the skies, business as usual below. In near-documentary style and at an unhurried pace, the film begins by focusing on heroes who almost never get mentioned in a September 11 context: the air-traffic controllers, engaging in ordinary chat that suggests just another day.

Snippets of a foreign tongue are picked up over the flight recorder, alerting them that something was seriously amiss in the cockpit. When it took off at 8:42, at least one hijacking was already well under way (American Flight 11 hit the north tower at 8:46). Twenty minutes earlier, the Boston control center had received the first suspicious transmission from the first hijacked aircraft: "We have some planes."