Past tense

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As I’m sure you are aware, United Airlines’ Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 — the one that did not reach its target. I shall ignore the internet-based argument over what happened to United 93 in its final minutes (did it crash into the ground or explode in the air?) since this film is a telling rather than an investigation. We may ask questions when we emerge from the cinema, but no one is asking questions in the film.

In fact, names you will not hear mentioned during the course of the film include Osama bin Laden, al-Qa’eda, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, Afghanistan. No one but the hijackers has any idea what’s going on; the attack, quite literally, falls out of the sky. ‘A hijacking?’ queries someone at the Federal Aviation Administration, when the first plane stops ‘squawking’ to air-traffic control. ‘We haven’t had one of those for 40 years!’ The military, once alerted to the situation, shouts repeatedly, ‘We have a real world situation!’ It seems no one could quite believe what they were hearing.

To recreate the 90-minute journey of United 93, Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, The Bourne Supremacy) has constructed what he calls a ‘plausible truth’, based on the information he has been able to access: details of flight recordings and from public records, interviews with families of the passengers, with members of the 9/11 Commission, with flight controllers and with military personnel. Mohammed Atta’s written instructions for the mission were, we are told in the production notes, given to the actors cast as the hijackers.

It doesn’t stop there — Greengrass is determined to treat style and content with equal responsibility.