Flight 93

Very few movies leave an audience quiet and somber when they walk out the doors and back to the real world. I remember the same strange quietness when leaving Saving Private Ryan. My wife and I had watched it with another couple and when we walked to our cars I remember looking at my friend and saying, wow, that was powerful.

The story of Flight 93 is one we all know and there was no intrigue or plot twists to keep you wondering where it all would end, we all know where it ended, with a smoking hole in the ground near Shanksville Pennsylvania. But this movie kept me nervously fidgeting in my chair until the final credits rolled. The director chose to use more of a documentary style when making Flight 93. The quick cuts and moving camera angles makes it seem very first person, again a comparison with Private Ryan is in order.

I was hoping that the savage attacks inside the plane would not be too graphic and they were not, while you know what has happened, there are no close-ups or special effects of the murders of the flight crew and passengers. It is however, unflinching and powerful.

The passengers on that plane were in fact our first response to 9/11. They knew if they did nothing, they would die along with many more Americans. They chose to act, with the knowledge that they faced a very slim chance of success in re-taking the plane. But they acted. We will never know how many lives they saved, but we know what it cost them. It cost them everything.

The director, Paul Greengrass, also used this movie to show the terrorists as people. The movie begins with the plotters praying and reading the Koran in a hotel room, they seem sane, and acting with a purpose. I am relieved that this was not a Chuck Norris type of film, where the bad guys are crazy and stupid.

The film shows just what we face in this war. A patient, calculating and determined foe who cannot be reasoned with, or bargained with. They want to kill us, every one of us, down to the last innocent child. I believe that Al Qaida is here in America, waiting and plotting, planning to give us another day on the calendar to remember. We have 9/11, the English have 7/7, the Russians have 9/3, how many new days of infamy will we suffer through before we get it through our collective heads that if we do not kill these killers, the America we inherited from our fathers and mothers is going to be very different from the one we hand to our children. An America with armed soldiers on the street corners and suicide bombers at our malls and schools.

Flight 93 is a bucket of ice water thrown on a nation that has hit the snooze button and went back to sleep.