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On a Doomed 9/11 Flight, Heroes Are Humans, Too

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By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

  • Jan. 30, 2006

"Hero" is one of those overused accolades that diminishes as it ennobles: it separates its bearer from the rest of us and puts him on a distant pedestal. "Flight 93," on A&E tonight, is a made-for-television movie about the final hours of the men and women aboard the fourth airplane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001. It restores the passengers' humanity without skimping on their bravery.

Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett and others are depicted as they must have been: ordinary people, clammy and terrified, who by storming the plane's cockpit, acted rationally and unselfishly at a moment when instinct might have led them to wait passively, clinging to irrational hope.

The movie is respectful, but avoids aggrandizing or demonizing the players: the handful of men who made the decision to try to overpower the terrorists are as scared and uncertain as the other passengers. By the end, the Islamic hijackers are as frightened as their captives. On the ground, the crisis is monitored with moments of tense efficiency as well as bureaucratic miscommunication and maddening breaks in the chain of command.

Perhaps one of the most searing scenes is when Tom Burnett (Jeffrey Nordling) places a furtive cellphone call to his wife, Deena (Kendall Cross), at home in their suburban house making breakfast for three small children, and tells her to inform the authorities, then hangs up. Trembling, she reaches for the Yellow Pages.

Sept. 11, and particularly Flight 93, is now a hallowed subject. There have been several books about the doomed flight, and Paul Greengrass, who directed "The Bourne Supremacy," is making a movie about it for Universal Pictures. In September the Discovery Channel showed "The Flight That Fought Back," a semi-dramatized account of the tragedy that blended interviews with victims' family members and re-enactments by actors.

A&E's dramatization, an early contribution in what is likely to be many such homages on the eve of the fifth anniversary, tells the story without resorting to cheap sentiment or cinematic special effects. (Discovery diluted the power of the story by adding a narration by Kiefer Sutherland as well as split-screen storytelling, and elapsed-time readouts borrowed from the Fox series "24.")

Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, was the last of the four to crash on Sept. 11; unlike the other three planes, that United Airlines flight continued transmitting over the radio during the first struggle in the cockpit.

The scheduled 8:01 departure was delayed for some 40 minutes, so Flight 93 lifted off just a few minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. The passengers on Flight 93 soon heard about the attacks in New York and on the Pentagon from relatives talking to them by cellphone, and quickly realized that their flight was going to be used in the same way.

Some of the film's details — a chat between flight attendants in the galley before the hijacking, the coffee Mr. Burnett was served in the first-class section, the way a passenger is stabbed — had to be imagined. But most of the scenes in "Flight 93" are based on sketchy details that hijacked passengers related to family members by cellphone, like one passenger's report that the hijackers tied red scarves around their own foreheads just before taking over the plane. Others come from the recording recovered from the aircraft's black box.

The 2004 report from the Sept. 11 commission provided fresh details about what happened in the cockpit of Flight 93 in its last minutes. Among other things, the report disclosed that the phrase "Let's roll" — previously reported as a rallying cry, and one that President Bush repeated in speeches (it also became the title of a best seller about the crash) — may have been misinterpreted. On the plane's voice recorder, a passenger is heard yelling, "Roll it!" Some aviation experts have suggested that this was actually a reference to a food cart the passengers used as a battering ram.

Perhaps understandably, "Flight 93" stays with the first, more famous interpretation of the phrase, though it is careful not to depict which passenger says it.

The film does follow the commission's account of how, in the last minutes, passengers mounted their assault on the cockpit and the hijackers struggled to maintain control, with the man piloting the plane first rolling it from side to side to knock the passengers off balance, then, when they breached the door, intentionally crashing the plane into a Pennsylvania field. But the film does not show the actual crash in Shanksville, Pa.

"Flight 93" is gripping from the very first scene — a United Airlines pilot putting on his uniform while his wife sleeps — then builds tension like any Hollywood thriller. But this is not "Flightplan" or "Red Eye" or "24." It's the real thing, and all the more chilling for depicting how real, ordinary people lived their final moments and prepared for their deaths.

A&E, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Directed by Peter Markle; written by Nevin Schreiner; David Gerber, executive producer; Delia Fine, executive producer for A&E Television; David Craig, supervising producer for A&E Television; produced by Clara George. An A&E Network presentation of a David Gerber Company Production produced in association with Fox Television Studios, produced by Fox Television Studios.

WITH: Jeffrey Nordling (Tom Burnett), Ty Olsson (Mark Bingham), Brennan Elliott (Todd Beamer), Colin Glazer (Jeremy Glick) and Kendall Cross (Deena Burnett).

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United We Fall

What’s wrong with the flight 93 movie..

The response to United 93 , Paul Greengrass’ docudrama-style imagining of what might have taken place on that doomed 81-minute flight, has been almost universally one of hushed tones and murmured praise, from both the left and right. The New York Post calls it a “respectful, inspiring” film that’s “in no way exploitative or emotionally manipulative,” while the Village Voice praises its “discretion” and christens Greengrass “the Maya Lin of cine-memorialists.”

This curious critical emphasis on taste, which presumes that the most successful evocation of 9/11 must be the one that exercises the maximum restraint, speaks to the discomfort that we still feel about representations of that dreadful day. To what extent, at what level of gruesome detail, can we allow ourselves to relive it? To what extent do we want to? And even if someone, say, Paul Greengrass, can craft the ideal representation of 9/11 (the most tasteful, the most meticulously researched, the most “true”), what does it avail us to watch the thing?

I hope I don’t sound like a cynic with a heart of lead when I say that United 93 , as grueling as it was to sit through, left me feeling curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful. At some point, Greengrass’ exquisite delicacy and tact toward all sides—the surviving families, the baffled air-traffic controllers, even the hijackers themselves—began to smack of political pussyfooting. What is Greengrass actually trying to say about 9/11? That it was a terrible day on which innocent people suffered and died? That the chaos and shock of that morning’s events (skillfully evoked via hand-held camera and real-time pacing) kept anyone, even the air-traffic controllers who watched the hijackings unfold, from understanding what was going on until it was too late? Paul Greengrass has spoken, somewhat portentously, of the events on United 93 as constituting “the DNA of our times.” Fine, but how is the pattern of that DNA expressed in United 93 ? Why was this film made, and why was it made now?

United 93 is no Schindler’s List , relying on characterization and storytelling to draw viewers into identifying with an otherwise unimaginable horror. If anything, Greengrass’ agenda is an anti-identificatory one. If the Spielberg of Schindler’s List is a wheedling seducer, Greengrass is a chillingly precise archivist. He never cuts away to the families of the Flight 93 passengers, arriving home to listen to their heart-rending voicemail messages. He never visits the inside of the three planes that did crash into buildings that day; we’re aware of their fate only through the words of the air-traffic controllers, some clips of CNN news coverage, and one terrifying stock shot of the plane hitting the second tower. He barely even names the passengers—an hour into the movie, I still hadn’t figured out which one was Todd Beamer—and makes a point of stressing their utter unspecialness, their glazed stares and dull in-flight chatter. The suspense, such as it is, is purely negative—we know in advance what will happen to Flight 93, so the maddeningly slow burn of the film’s first hour (Businessmen heft suitcases! Flight attendants chat about condiments!) serves only to torment us with the anxiety of the inevitable.

As if sensing that American audiences need some break from this Spam-in-a-can claustrophobia, Greengrass builds into his story a cathartic act of anti-terrorist violence that may or may not have taken place on the actual flight. I’ll refrain from describing this act to preserve at least a scrap of traditional movie-style suspense. But it’s worth noting that this possibly imaginary attack is the only moment that allows viewers to act out their 9/11 vengeance fantasies (“Take that, Osama!”).

In every other scene, Greengrass maintains an almost maddening neutrality—a neutrality that shades at times into what might feel to some viewers like sympathy with the devil. In a late scene, Greengrass crosscuts between the hijackers’ final prayers (“ Allahu akbar “) and those of the passengers (“Our Father, who art in heaven”). The scene’s implicit message—that terrorists and victims alike turned to their God in those awful final moments—would seem to contradict the film’s ostensible mission: to honor the passengers who rebelled and stormed the cockpit. Greengrass wouldn’t dare say, and may not believe, that the four hijackers demonstrated their own twisted form of courage (a claim that in the with-us-or-against-us days post-9/11 cost Bill Maher his job at ABC), but the intercutting of the prayers suggests exactly that, perhaps contrary to the filmmaker’s intention. It’s one of the moments when his attempt to cover all bases leaves the film feeling not complex, but simply muddled.

In the last five years, “9/11” has become a generic brand name for terrorism, its sky-high recognition quotient useful for ginning up support for any and all manner of belligerent causes. The closest this film ever comes to a political statement—and possibly the only laugh line in the movie—is the snappish question of a beleaguered official: “Do we have any communication with the president at all?” Greenglass may not want to come right out and say it, but the audience’s weary chuckle made it clear: As we slog into the fourth year of the war being waged in 9/11’s wake (and, at least in part, in its name), there’s still no satisfactory answer to that question.

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Opinion 'United 93': The Real Picture

How accurate is "United 93," Universal Pictures' new movie depicting the drama and heroism aboard the fourth plane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001? The answer tells us a lot about Hollywood and government in the age of terrorism: The film is closer to the truth than every account the government put out before the 9/11 commission's investigation. Its release marks our passage through the post-9/11 looking glass, with our wildest fairy tales now spun not in Hollywood, but in Washington.

flight 93 movie review

The facts of 9/11 are as simple as they are grim. The military officers in charge of the air defense mission did not receive notice of any of the four hijackings in time to respond before the planes crashed. The passengers and crew aboard United Airlines Flight 93 really were alone. They were all that stood between the hijackers and the Capitol (or possibly the White House). That is the core reality of that morning, and "United 93" gets it right.

The movie does make some concessions to drama. As one of the commission staffers whom the filmmakers consulted (on an unpaid basis) about what happened on 9/11, I believe, for instance, that the movie's climax shows the passengers penetrating farther into the cockpit than the evidence supports.

But compare the harsh truth that the movie accurately portrays with this account from a documentary special that aired on ABC on Sept. 11, 2002:

Army Brig. Gen. W. Montague Winfield: "The decision was made to try to go intercept Flight 93."

Vice President Cheney: "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down that plane full of Americans, is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before."

. . . Montague: "The vice president briefed into the conference that the president had given us permission to shoot down innocent civilian aircraft that threatened Washington, D.C. Again, in the National Military Command Center, everything stopped for a short second as the impact of those words [sank] in."

. . . Charles Gibson, ABC News: "Colonel Bob Marr is in command at the Northeast Air Defense Sector base in Rome, New York."

Marr: "I got the call and I, the words that I remember as clear as day [were], 'We will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground.' "

Gibson: "Marr orders his controllers, 'Tell the pilots to intercept Flight 93.' "

. . . Marr: "And we of course passed that on to the pilots. United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C."

Like the other government versions of 9/11, this account has all the pulse-pounding suspense of a classic movie thriller. It is also, as we discovered at the commission and as "United 93" makes clear, almost completely untrue.

The Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) was not following United 93 on radar; it wasn't even informed that the plane had been hijacked until four minutes after the crash. The authorization to shoot down commercial aircraft was not received until about 30 minutes after the plane went down, and 15 minutes after the military air defenders learned of the crash. The authorization was not passed on to the pilots. Once again, the film depicts the controlling reality more accurately: People were making judgments based on faulty information amid complete chaos.

The question we at the commission asked repeatedly was how the official accounts could have been so wrong. The answer came back: It was the fog of war. The day was too confusing, and government officials hadn't had time to reconstruct events.

But the fog wasn't that thick. The critical times and notifications were recorded in contemporaneous logs virtually all along the chain of command. In testimony before Congress and the commission, officials attributed the pivotal event of the morning -- the scramble of fighters from Langley Air Force Base -- to reports that American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, and United 93 had been hijacked. But the government's own records revealed that the Langley fighters were scrambled in response to a mistaken report, received at 9:21 a.m., that American Flight 11 -- the first plane hijacked -- was still airborne and heading toward Washington.

That truth, the final commission report notes, emerges "not just from taped conversations at NEADS but also from taped conversations at FAA centers; contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS, Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD; and other records." In short, anyone who looked would have seen right through the fog.

And it's clear that officials were looking. There was a White House briefing on the facts of 9/11 within a week of the attacks. There were countless interviews, television specials and even an official Air Force history of the day, "Air War Over America."

But the story that officials told made the government's response appear quicker and more coordinated than it really was. By telling the public that the Langley fighters were scrambled in response to reports that American 77 and United 93 had been hijacked, officials were able to avoid admitting that they had scrambled fighters in the wrong direction -- heading east, not west toward Pennsylvania -- against a plane that didn't exist. They were also able to say that they had been following United 93 for about 47 minutes before it crashed and were thus well positioned to shoot down the plane if the passengers and crew hadn't acted.

That, of course, was impossible. At the time when North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) officials told the commission they began tracking United 93 -- 9:16 a.m. -- the plane hadn't been hijacked yet. That didn't occur until 9:28.

Finally, many of the Federal Aviation Administration and Defense Department records that establish the truth of that day were withheld from the commission until they were subpoenaed. In one of its final acts, the commission asked the inspectors general of the Transportation and Defense departments to investigate who was responsible for the mistaken accounts of the morning's events.

That was more than 18 months ago. The inspectors general have now had longer than the life of the 9/11 commission itself to investigate. While we await their results, we can watch the movie and wonder at a government so lost in spin that it took Hollywood to set the record straight.

[email protected]

John Farmer, a former attorney general of New Jersey, was a senior counsel to the 9/11 commission.

flight 93 movie review

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Flight 93 Reviews

  • 1 hr 29 mins
  • Drama, Suspense
  • Watchlist Where to Watch

The story of heroism that arose from the Sept. 11 tragedy is remembered in a dramatization recalling how passengers aboard hijacked Flight 93 fought back against the terrorists. Todd Beamer: Brennan Elliott. Tom Burnett: Jeffrey Nordling. Mark Bingham: Ty Olsson. Deena Burnett: Kendall Cross. Jeremy Glick: Colin Glazer.

Director Peter Markle's made-for-cable movie steers clear of stereotyped Hollywood heroics and cliched suspense tactics to tell the story of United Flight 93, whose passengers rebelled against terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001. It begins as copilots Leroy Homer Jr. (Biski Gugushe) and Jason Dahl (Barry W. Levy) cleared the Newark runway for a cross-country trip to San Francisco. The passenger manifest includes Todd Beamer (Brennan Elliott), Elizabeth Wainio (Laura Mennell), Tom Burnett (Jeffrey Nordling), Jeremy Glick (Colin Glazer), Lauren Grandcolas (Jacqueline Ann Steuart), Mark Bingham (Ty Olsson), and four Al Qaeda loyalists armed with knives and a homemade bomb. They soon take over the plane, after stabbing first-class passenger Mickey Rothenberg (Jerry Wasserman), slitting the throat of a stewardess and murdering both pilots. The first- and second-class passengers are herded together and, despite their captors' assurances that everything will be all right, they begin to wonder about the fact that no one has made any ransom demands. By the time the plane detours south, the passengers have learned that three other planes have made suicide crashes into the World Trade towers and the Pentagon, and they come to the inescapable conclusion that their plane is also going to be flown into a national landmark. As U.S. military commanders give the go-ahead for a missile strike against the plane headed toward the nation's capital, the doomed passengers phone their loved ones and make a joint decision to storm the cockpit and prevent a kamikaze dive into the White House. Flight 93 crashed at Shanksville, Penn., after a trip that lasted one hour and 53 minutes. Although supposition must inevitably accompany any account of what happened aboard Flight 93 (die-hard conspiracy theorists have even suggested that the passengers may not have breached the cockpit and that the missile interception wasn't aborted), this sober account pays equal attention to what transpires aboard the plane, at the workstations of air-traffic controllers and in the living rooms of the passengers’ loved ones. Screenwriter Nevin Schreiner refrains from using the victims' backstories and tearful cell-phone farewells to sentimentalize the tragedy, and Markle keeps the action moving fluidly while guiding his cast of unfamiliar faces through a remarkable ensemble performance.

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2006, Drama, 1h 30m

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Flight 93   photos.

In this dramatization, unsuspecting passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 board the aircraft on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. After three other planes strike their intended targets, al-Qaida terrorists on Flight 93 make their move, threatening the passengers into submission by claiming to have an explosive onboard. But calls to loved ones reveal the truth, and the passengers -- including Todd Beamer (Brennan Elliott) and Tom Burnett (Jeffrey Nordling) -- plan to take back the flight.

Rating: TVPG

Genre: Drama

Original Language: Arabic

Director: Peter Markle

Producer: Clara George

Writer: Nevin Schreiner

Release Date (Streaming): Mar 1, 2013

Runtime: 1h 30m

Production Co: Fox Television Studios

Cast & Crew

Jeffrey Nordling

Tom Burnett

Mark Bingham

Colin Glazer

Jeremy Glick

Brennan Elliott

Todd Beamer

Kendall Cross

Deena Burnett

Monnae Michaell

Lisa Jefferson

April Telek

Laura Mennell

Elizabeth Wainio

Gwynyth Walsh

Esther Heyman

Peter Markle

Nevin Schreiner

Clara George

David Gerber

Executive Producer

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One of the saddest movies ive ever seen.

Flight 93 (2006 TV Movie)

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2012, FLIGHT

Flight – review

A s Lloyd Bridges says in Airplane!: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking!" – a declaration he later famously modifies to take in smoking, sniffing glue and doing amphetamines. Before seeing this, I had thought that, between them, and from different directions, Airplane! and the real-time 9/11 drama United 93 had more or less finished off the aeroplane disaster movie. But this flawed yet enjoyable film from screenwriter John Gatins and director Robert Zemeckis proves that it can still be kept airborne, with a little re-invention.

Flight looks very much like a fictionalised true story, based on some New York Times bestseller. Actually, it isn't. Gatins has built his film around a single extraordinary detail that emerged from a real-life US air disaster in 2000: the hair-raising theory that a passenger jet in apparently fatal freefall can be made to level out and go into a safe glide, if the pilot can just pull off one particular, terrifying manoeuvre. To try it, he has to be desperate, and probably very drunk.

There is some terrific white-knuckle tension: but where the genre traditionally puts the high aeronautical drama at the very end, Zemeckis wrongfoots the audience as to where in his film the oxygen-mask-dropping crisis is going to come, and what kind of film it is therefore going to be. As well an airplane-disaster movie, Flight is a solemn and faintly anti-climactic tale of personal growth and moral choices, with some religiose murmurings about survival and fate. The story's central love-interest strand is a bit superfluous (and the movie frankly sags in this area) but its star, Denzel Washington , tackles the juiciest of lead roles with gusto, and the finale is entertaining, when it looks as if our hero's life has once again gone into a screaming nosedive and is about to make what the airline industry euphemistically calls "uncontrolled contact with the ground".

Washington is Captain Whip Whitaker, a highly experienced airline pilot who is also a functioning alcoholic. We first see him in a hotel room on a stopover, and here I thought John Gatins was obeying a law of "sexposition", using sex to spice up exposition scenes. One of these is that when two sleazy guys need to discuss something, they have to do it in a pole-dancing club; another is that when a sleazy guy has to wake up in a hotel room, a naked woman must be getting dressed in the background. Actually, this isn't quite what's happening: Whitaker is having an increasingly serious affair with a stewardess, Katerina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez), and poor Katerina is one of Whip's enablers, the people who cover up his addiction.

Whip has awoken with a massive hangover, so to cure it and generally stay sharp, he takes a python-sized line of coke before heading out to the airport; he struts authoritatively on to the plane (discreetly later than Katerina) and to his young co-pilot's horror, treats himself to an oxygen livener before takeoff. He and his passengers are to face a horrifying situation, but for Whip, matters just keep getting worse. Using some pretty hefty plot tweaks and narrative contrivances, Zemeckis's movie plays out to a watchable conclusion. With the help of a beautiful recovering smack addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly) and his toughly loyal colleague Charlie (Bruce Greenwood), Whip must figure out what he must do to stay true to himself. But it could also be that he might need one final volley of substance abuse courtesy of his unspeakable dealer, Harling, played by John Goodman.

In some ways, Washington is giving us a variant on the character he played in Training Day : the uniformed authority figure with some serious off-the-record habits. There is something in Washington's natural gravitas and bearing which looks fascinating when it is mixed with sin. Washington is also very good at showing how skilled an addict is at "presenting" – at putting on a show of nothing being wrong.

Weirdly, this movie reminded me of an anecdote I heard the veteran performer Thora Hird recount about her father, who told her never to drink before going on stage, and to make a point of telling everyone about this rule. He admitted that she could probably drink a good deal without it affecting her; but the point was that if she made any innocent mistake at all, everyone would say she was a drunk. Poor Whip feels guilty, yet knows that he technically isn't. Maybe the zing of coke and booze even gave him inspiration at the controls on that terrible flight, but of course Whip knows that whatever the truth, his whole life is crashing. Flight is one of those films which starts to come to pieces when you start thinking about it afterwards, but with Zemeckis at the controls, it's a very enjoyable watch. Maybe not in-flight, however.

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flight 93 movie review

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After opening with one of the most terrifying flying scenes I've witnessed, in which an airplane is saved by being flown upside down, Robert Zemeckis ' "Flight" segues into a brave and tortured performance by Denzel Washington — one of his very best. Not often does a movie character make such a harrowing personal journey that keeps us in deep sympathy all of the way.

Washington plays Whip Whitaker, a veteran commercial airlines pilot who over the years has built up a shaky tolerance for quantities of alcohol and cocaine that would be lethal for most people. At the film opens, he's finishing an all-night party with a friendly flight attendant named Katerina ( Nadine Velazquez ) and jolts himself back into action with two lines of cocaine. His co-pilot ( Brian Geraghty ) eyes him suspiciously, but Whip projects poise and authority from behind his dark aviator glasses.

Their flight takes off in a disturbing rainstorm and encounters the kind of turbulence that has the co-pilot crying out, "Oh, Lord!" But Whip powers them at high speed into an area of clear sky, before a mechanical malfunction sends the aircraft into an uncontrollable nosedive. Zemeckis and his team portray the terror in the cabin in stomach-churning style. Acting on instinct, seeming cool as ice, the veteran pilot inverts the plane to halt its descent, and it flies level upside-down until he rights it again to glide into a level crash-landing in an open field.

The field, as it happens, is next to a little church, and the way Zemeckis portrays an outdoor baptism on the ground below captures the hyper-realism with which I imagine we notice things when we think we're about to die. Only six people do die in the crash, and Whittaker is hailed as a hero.

Will this close call bring an end to his drinking? He retreats to his grandfather's farm where he was raised, pours out all his booze and is dry for a time — until he's told by his union representative ( Bruce Greenwood ) and his lawyer ( Don Cheadle ), that blood tests show he was flying drunk. A government hearing is fraught with hazard (he faces a possible life sentence). Meanwhile, he is befriended by a woman named Nicole ( Kelly Reilly ), who he met in the hospital, and she takes him to an AA meeting, but the program is not for him.

It becomes clear that intoxication is more important to Whip than anything else; it cost him a marriage and the respect of his son. One of the most effective things in Washington's performance is the way he puts up an impassive facade to conceal his defiant addiction. "No one else could have landed that plane!" he insists, and indeed tests in a flight simulator back him up. The fact remains that he was stoned.

One of the most gripping scenes takes place in a hotel room where Whittaker is being held essentially under guard for the week before his official hearing. At a crucial moment, his drug supplier Harling Mays ( John Goodman ) turns up, marching toward camera in one of a series of garish Hawaiian shirts, ready to battle a crisis. I don't have any idea if cocaine can snap you back from a killer hangover, but I wouldn't count on it.

Denzel Washington is one of the most sympathetic and rock-solid of actors, and it's effective here how his performance never goes over the top but instead is grounded on obsessive control. There are many scenes inviting emotional displays. A lesser actor might have wanted to act them out. Washington depends on his eyes, his manner and a gift for projecting inner emotion. In the way it meets every requirement of a tricky plot, this is an ideal performance.

Among the supporting performances, Don Cheadle projects guarded motivations, Greenwood is a loyal friend, Goodman seems like a handy medic, and Brian Geraghty's panic in the co-pilot's seat underlines the horror. "Flight," a title with more than one meaning, is strangely the first live-action feature in 12 years by Robert Zemeckis, who seemed committed to stop-motion animation (" Beowulf ," " The Polar Express ," " Disney's A Christmas Carol "). It is nearly flawless. I can think of another final line of dialogue for Whip Whitaker's character ("My name is Whip, and I'm an alcoholic"), but that's just me.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Flight movie poster

Flight (2012)

Rated R for drug and alcohol abuse, language, sexuality/nudity and an intense action sequence

138 minutes

Denzel Washington as Whip

Don Cheadle as Hugh

John Goodman as Harling

Brian Geraghty as Ken

Bruce Greenwood as Charlie

Nadine Velazquez as Katerina

Directed by

  • Robert Zemeckis
  • John Gatins

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COMMENTS

  1. United 93 movie review & film summary (2006)

    The movie does not know, because the people on the screen do not have the opportunity of hindsight. All of these larger matters are far offscreen. The third act of the film focuses on the desperation on board United 93, after the hijackers take control, slash flight attendants, kill the pilots and seem to have a bomb.

  2. United 93 (2006)

    United 93: Directed by Paul Greengrass. With J.J. Johnson, Gary Commock, Polly Adams, Opal Alladin. A real-time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on September 11th, 2001 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot.

  3. United 93

    Movie Info. On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists seize control of United Airlines Flight 93 and three other planes. As realization of the imminent horror dawns on passengers, crew and loved ones on the ...

  4. The missing facts in 'United 93'

    The missing facts in 'United 93'. There are several puzzling facts that the film "United 93" does not even attempt to address. The first is the fact that Flight 93 left a debris trail extending over 8 miles long. This is not consistent with a plane "brought down" by passengers within -- but it IS consistent with a plane that was shot down.

  5. Flight 93: The Movie Movie Review

    FLIGHT 93: THE MOVIE follows events in the air and on the ground during 9/11 with an emphasis (initially) on the mundane chores of passengers and flight crew getting ready for the transcontinental flight, while their families begin the day at home. Also on board Flight 93 are the Islamic suicide terrorists, more or less led by Ziad Jarrah (Amin ...

  6. United 93 (film)

    United 93 is a 2006 docudrama thriller film written and directed by Paul Greengrass.The film largely chronicles the events aboard United Airlines Flight 93, one of the four hijacked flights during the September 11 attacks and the only one not to hit its intended target due to the intervention of passengers and crew; it also covers the experiences of government officials and air traffic ...

  7. Flight 93 (film)

    Flight 93 is a 2006 American drama television film directed by Peter Markle and written by Nevin Schreiner, which chronicles the events onboard United Airlines Flight 93 during the September 11 attacks in 2001. It premiered on January 30, 2006, on A&E, and was re-broadcast several times throughout 2006.. The film stars Jeffrey Nordling, Colin Glazer, Brennan Elliott, Ty Olsson, Jacqueline Ann ...

  8. United 93

    Acclaimed filmmaker Paul Greengrass writes and directs an unflinching drama that tells the story of the passengers and crew, their families on the ground and the flight controllers who watched in dawning horror as United Flight 93 became the fourth hijacked plane on the day of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil: September 11, 2001. (Universal Pictures)

  9. United 93 (2006)

    The terrorists prepare themselves and on September 11, 2001, they board United Airlines Flight 93 departing from Newark to San Francisco. As they prepare to take off, planes are being hijacked. Chaos break out in air traffic control. Once in the air, the first plane crashes into the World Trade Center.

  10. Flight 93

    "Flight 93," on A&E tonight, is a made-for-television movie about the final hours of the men and women aboard the fourth airplane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001. It restores the passengers' humanity ...

  11. Flight 93 (TV Movie 2006)

    Flight 93: Directed by Peter Markle. With Jeffrey Nordling, Brennan Elliott, Kendall Cross, Ty Olsson. Flight 93 is the story of the heroic passengers that took back their plane in an effort to stop a 9-11 terrorist attack.

  12. United 93 reviewed.

    April 27, 20065:54 PM. Passengers comfort each other in United 93. The response to United 93, Paul Greengrass' docudrama-style imagining of what might have taken place on that doomed 81-minute ...

  13. Opinion

    April 30, 2006 at 1:00 a.m. EDT. How accurate is "United 93," Universal Pictures' new movie depicting the drama and heroism aboard the fourth plane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001? The answer tells us ...

  14. Whose story is 'Flight93'?

    British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, as I've mentioned before, is surely the most accomplished action-thriller director around these days. "Bloody Sunday" and "The Bourne Supremacy" are evidence enough of that. This week, Greengrass's "United 93," about the September 11, 2001, flight now commemorated in a Pennsylvania field, opens the Tribeca Film Festival and then moves into theaters. David ...

  15. Flight 93

    Flight 93 Reviews. The story of heroism that arose from the Sept. 11 tragedy is remembered in a dramatization recalling how passengers aboard hijacked Flight 93 fought back against the terrorists ...

  16. Flight 93

    Flight 93 Reviews. Tense made-for-TV movie about Sept.11 skyjacking. The film is put together for us to watch what happens, not to participate with them. Flight 93 is most certainly destined to be ...

  17. Flight 93

    Movie Info. In this dramatization, unsuspecting passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 board the aircraft on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. After three other planes strike their intended ...

  18. United 93 (2006)

    Synopsis. The film opens early on the morning of September 11, 2001 with the hijackers praying in their hotel room, then leaving for Newark Liberty International Airport. At the airport, the passengers and crew board United Airlines Flight 93 along with the hijackers. Shortly after boarding, Flight 93 runs into rush hour traffic, and the flight ...

  19. Kid reviews for Flight 93: The Movie

    September 30, 2011. age 13+. Adriannah is awesome+ i am a comedian!!!!!!!! LOL. the movie Flight 93 is a good movie to show young adults, around the age of 13+. There are positive messges in this movie that young kids could here but some parents are picky about what they let there kids watch. There are many good role models and i am only 13 ...

  20. Flight 93 (TV Movie 2006)

    Four hijackers take over United 93 as confusion reins back in the air and on the ground. The passengers calling from the plane surmises the hijackers' plan and try to retake the aircraft. It's a made-for-TV movie on the A&E Network. It's relatively well-made movie with a few recognizable faces among the crowd.

  21. Flight

    Flight - review. This article is more than 11 years old ... Airplane! and the real-time 9/11 drama United 93 had more or less finished off the aeroplane disaster movie. But this flawed yet ...

  22. From Paris With Love movie review (2010)

    No overall sense of the choreography. I hasten to say this is not criticism of John Travolta. He succeeds in this movie by essentially acting in a movie of his own. The fight construction is the same with most modern action movies. In past decades, studios went so far as to run fencing classes for swordfights.

  23. Flight movie review & film summary (2012)

    It is nearly flawless. I can think of another final line of dialogue for Whip Whitaker's character ("My name is Whip, and I'm an alcoholic"), but that's just me. Drama. Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.