flight 93 movie review

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Parents' guide to, flight 93: the movie.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 0 Reviews
• Kids Say 2 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Tense made-for-TV movie about Sept.11 skyjacking.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this is not the theatrical United 93 motion picture but a less-hyped cable-TV movie telling the same story of the ill-fated but heroic passengers of a September 11 plane commandeered by terrorists. Unlike the other film, this does not drop F-bombs of mass destruction, but there is…

Why Age 13+?

Some quick slashings with box-cutter knives (some blood shown), and a man is spl

Even the aircraft insignia are left out, though soft-drink labels show on a beve

Hardly any rough language.

Any Positive Content?

Passengers cope with the grim situation of being hijacked on a suicide terrorist

Parents need to know that this is not the theatrical United 93 motion picture but a less-hyped cable-TV movie telling the same story of the ill-fated but heroic passengers of a September 11 plane commandeered by terrorists. Unlike the other film, this does not drop F-bombs of mass destruction, but there is still considerable intensity and tragedy, especially in the passengers and their families realizing that death is inevitable. There is some violence, as the terrorists take over the aircraft with knives and threats of a bomb.

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Violence & Scariness

Some quick slashings with box-cutter knives (some blood shown), and a man is splashed with boiling water. The worst is left to the imagination.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Even the aircraft insignia are left out, though soft-drink labels show on a beverage cart being used as battering-ram.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Passengers cope with the grim situation of being hijacked on a suicide terrorist mission, and ultimately they decide to foil the marauders even at the cost of their own lives.

Where to Watch

Parent and kid reviews.

• Parents Say
• Kids Say (2)

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What's the Story?

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 Nazemzadeh). By the time the terrorists take control of the plane and cockpit by force and sharply altered its course, the passengers have already gotten word via their own cellular phones of three other airliners made to go kamikaze. Some of them tearfully say goodbye to their families, some pray. The soon-to-be famous Todd Beamer (Brennan Elliott) stays on his hookup with a shocked Verizon Wireless operator (Monnae Michaell), giving her updates right up until the end -- when several of the hostages vote to rush the terrorist-occupied cabin. The plane crashes (offscreen, but a farmer watches it wheeling overhead) in a Pennsylvania field rather than hitting an intended target, almost certainly one in Washington D.C.

Is It Any Good?

Viewers who didn't think Hollywood had much business making money retelling this raw-wound story probably won't be convinced by this film, or its counterpart. No, this is NOT the United 93 theatrical movie about the hijacked Sept. 11 passenger airline that gave the USA Todd Beamer's alleged words "Let's roll" as an anti-terrorist rallying cry. It's actually a made-for-TV drama on exactly the same subject, released to home video at the same time United 93 was in wide release. The two features are mirror-images of each other, both laudable and honorably non-sensationalized attempts to dramatize the incomprehensible horror of the day. Flight 93 (produced for the A&E cable network) is, arguably, a little more family-friendly because it eschews profanity.

Viewers with the benefit of the DVD commentary track can hear the filmmakers discuss how much of what you are seeing is speculation based on the cellular phone calls and control-tower transmissions, and how much is true -- like the order going out to US military fighter-interceptors to blow the hostage flight out of the air if it gets near victims on the ground. Tweens and younger kids could be inclined to concoct fanciful solutions in which the flight might have been brought down safely. You can use that as a springboard for many serious concepts, about heroism, hopelessness, and sacrifice.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the way that the passengers, even in the dawning realization that there was no escape, rallied and thwarted the terrorists' goal of dropping Flight 93 on Washington D.C. This is a complex and loaded topic, dealing with self-sacrifice and mortality; expect kids to have a lot of questions. Ask teens with memories of September 11 and the wall-to-wall news coverage whether they thought this story needed to be told, and whether it satisfied anything they did not know or feel before. With older and more movie-savvy kids, you can talk about how the movie compared with other, vintage movies about real-life military attacks on the innocent, from flag-waving propaganda movies after Pearl Harbor to a spate of celebratory TV movies in the '70s after Israeli troops successfully freed terrorist hostages at Entebbe Airport. On another level, this movie and its theatrical twin are not like those at all. Does that make them more successful as tributes, or just another form of propaganda?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 30, 2006
• On DVD or streaming : May 3, 2006
• Cast : Brennan Elliott , Jeffrey Nordling , Ty Olsson
• Director : Peter Markle
• Studio : Sterling Entertainment
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 90 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : violence and emotional intensity
• Last updated : September 20, 2019

Did we miss something on diversity?

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Where to Watch

Rent United 93 on Fandango at Home, or buy it on Fandango at Home.

What to Know

Potent and sobering, United 93 treats the subject matter with respect, never resorting to Hollywood aggrandizement.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Paul Greengrass

David Alan Basche

Todd Beamer

Richard Bekins

William Joseph Cashman

Susan Blommaert

Jane Folger

Ray Charleson

Joseph DeLuca

Christian Clemenson

Thomas E. Burnett Jr.

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Related movie news.

History written in the moment

Imagining what may have happened aboard "United 93" on September 11, 2001.

It is not too soon for “United 93,” because it is not a film that knows any time has passed since 9/11. The entire story, every detail, is told in the present tense. We know what they know when they know it, and nothing else. Nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about Osama bin Laden, nothing about Afghanistan or Iraq, only events as they unfold. This is a masterful and heartbreaking film, and it does honor to the memory of the victims.

The director, Paul Greengrass , makes a deliberate effort to stay away from recognizable actors, and there is no attempt to portray the passengers or terrorists as people with histories. In most movies about doomed voyages, we meet a few key characters we’ll be following: The newlyweds, the granny, the businessman, the man with a secret. Here there’s none of that. What we know about the passengers on United 93 is exactly what we would know if we had been on the plane and sitting across from them: nothing, except for a few details of personal appearance.

Scenes on board the plane alternate with scenes inside the National Air Traffic Control Center, airport towers, regional air traffic stations, and a military command room. Here, too, there are no back stories. Just technicians living in the moment. Many of them are played by the actual people involved; we sense that in their command of procedure and jargon. When the controllers in the LaGuardia tower see the second airplane crash into the World Trade Center, they recoil with shock and horror, and that moment in the film seems as real as it seemed to me on Sept. 11, 2001.

The film begins on a black screen, and we hear one of the hijackers reading aloud from the Koran. There are scenes of the hijackers at prayer, and many occasions when they evoke God and dedicate themselves to him. These details may offend some viewers, but are almost certainly accurate; the hijacking and destruction of the four planes was carried out as a divine mission. That the majority of Muslims disapprove of terrorism goes without saying; on 9/12, there was a candlelight vigil in Iran for the United States. That the terrorists found justification in religion also goes without saying. Most nations at most times go into battle evoking the protection of their gods.

But the film doesn’t depict the terrorists as villains. It has no need to. Like everyone else in the movie they are people of ordinary appearance, going about their business. “United 93” is incomparably more powerful because it depicts all of its characters as people trapped in an inexorable progress toward tragedy. The movie contains no politics. No theory. No personal chit-chat. No patriotic speeches. We never see the big picture.

We watch United 93 as the passengers and crew board the plane and it prepares to depart. Four minutes later, the first plane went into the WTC. Living in the moment, we share the confusion of the air traffic controllers.

At first it’s reported a “small plane” crashed into the tower. Then by a process of deduction it’s determined it must have been a missing American flight. The full scope of the plot only gradually becomes clear. One plane after another abandons its flight plan and goes silent. There are false alarms: For more than an hour, a Delta flight is thought to have been hijacked, although it was not. At the FAA national center, the man in charge, Ben Sliney (playing himself) begins to piece things together, and orders a complete shutdown of all American air traffic. Given what a momentous decision this was, costing the airlines a fortune and disrupting a nation’s travel plans, we are grateful he had the nerve to make it.

As the outline of events come into focus, there is attempt to coordinate civilian and military authorities. It is doomed to fail. A liaison post is not staffed. Two jet fighters are sent up to intercept a hijacked plane, but they are not armed; there is discussion of having the fighters ram the jets as their pilots eject. A few other fighters are scrambled, but inexplicably fly east, over the ocean. Military commanders try again and again, with increasing urgency, to get presidential authorization to use force against civilian aircraft. An unbearable period of time passes, with no response.

“United 93” simply includes this in the flow of events, without comment. Many people seeing the film will remember the scene in “ Fahrenheit 9/11 ” in which President George W. Bush sat immobile in a children’s classroom in Florida for seven minutes after being informed of the attack on the WTC. What was he waiting for? Was he ever informed of the military request? 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. We are familiar with details of this flight, pieced together from many telephone calls from the plane and from the cockpit voice recorder. Greengrass is determined to be as accurate as possible. There is no false grandstanding, no phony arguments among the passengers, no individual heroes. The passengers are a terrified planeload of strangers. After they learn by phone about the WTC attacks, after an attendant says she saw the dead bodies of the two pilots, they decide they must take action. They storm the cockpit. Even as these brave passengers charge up the aisle, we know nothing in particular about them — none of the details we later learned. We could be on the plane, terrified, watching them. The famous words “Let’s roll” are heard but not underlined; these people are not speaking for history.

There has been much discussion of the movie’s trailer, and no wonder. It pieces together moments from “United 93” to make it seem more conventional, more like a thriller. Dialogue that seems absolutely realistic in context sounds, in the trailer, like sound bites and punch lines. To watch the trailer is to sense the movie that Greengrass did not make. To watch “United 93” is to be confronted with the grim chaotic reality of that September day in 2001.The movie is deeply disturbing, and some people may have to leave the theater. But it would have been much more disturbing if Greengrass had made it in a conventional way. He does not exploit, he draws no conclusions, he points no fingers, he avoids “human interest” and “personal dramas” and just simply watches. The movie’s point of view reminds me of the angels in “ Wings of Desire .” They see what people do and they are saddened, but they cannot intervene.

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.

• J.J. Johnson as Capt. Jason Dahl
• Christian Clemenson as Thomas Burnett
• Gregg Henry as Col. Robert Marr
• Becky London as Jean Hoadley Peterson
• Trish Gates as Sandra Bradshaw
• Cheyenne Jackson as Mark Bingham
• David Alan Basche as Todd Beamer
• Chip Zien as Mark Rothenberg

Written and directed by

• Paul Greengrass

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User reviews

Weak effort. Watch "United 93" instead

• I_am_RenegadeX
• Jan 8, 2007

Well done film focused on the people involved

• Jan 1, 2007
• specklescit
• Feb 2, 2006

We can never truly repay our fallen heroes, the least, we could do is honor them by telling their story. This movie was a soaring success.

• ironhorse_iv
• Sep 11, 2018
• Jun 28, 2006

The Day the World Changed

• claudio_carvalho
• Feb 23, 2007

well made TV movie of intense real life drama

• SnoopyStyle
• Sep 10, 2015

A Dreadfully Melodramatic Spin on a Real Tragedy

• Jan 31, 2006

Never cried as much in my life

• Jan 29, 2006

Nice but another A&E shaky production

• Apr 29, 2006

Comedy Gold.

• ratiocinator
• Aug 6, 2006

What a movie

• b_chocolate_2004

Random comments on a tragic event.

• Apr 28, 2006

Disappointing ending

• Apr 2, 2006

Emotional movie

• rick-fonseca
• Feb 14, 2006

A&E's Flight 93 is required viewing

• Feb 17, 2006

gets off to VERY bad start

• cornsaladisgood
• Oct 8, 2006

Good TV Movie

• killbill_28
• Jul 1, 2006

What is this?

• soadnirvana
• Jul 20, 2007

Lower budget video version actually better than big budget film version.

• Oct 7, 2009

A&E's Powerful Presentation Of One Of Our Era's Greatest Tragedies.

• May 8, 2006

Unbelievably...

• mattmoore90
• Feb 12, 2008

Great Movie

• Christmas-Reviewer

Well done, but not enough description

• Oct 19, 2006

Insulting Mawkfest

• dieBaumfabrik
• Sep 5, 2009

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United 93 review.

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Prometheus star defends ridley scott's most divisive alien movie with the best explanation of why audiences felt lost, wicked star cynthia erivo suggested 1 change to elphaba's iconic look in the movie, a gripping, realistic portrayal of the events of 9/11 centered on the passengers of united airlines flight 93 that's hard to watch but must be seen..

Where to start with this one? A sense of anxiety would be a good place... as in the feeling I had come upon me from the very first frame of United 93 , lasting all the way through to the very last frame of the film where the screen abruptly goes black.

There's no question that this is a very powerful, and important film covering what happened on September 11th, 2001 and focusing on the passengers and crew of the one airliner that did not make it to its intended target. Some have said that it's too soon for a movie depicting these events, but I disagree. It seems to me that just enough time has passed to where the events of that day... the crystal clear memories of the emotions we felt, have started to fade. Sure, we all remember what happened, but the raw emotion of it has been blunted by the passage of time. No, this is the right time for this film, as both a tribute to those who died and their families, and a kick-in-the-gut reminder to the rest of us of what that day felt like.

The film opens showing the perpetrators in their hotel room, preparing for what lies ahead through prayer and ritual. At this point I hesitate to use the word "terrorists" to describe them, because they are not portrayed as such... yet. What the director, Paul Greengrass has managed to do here is to create real, believable human beings on both sides of the event, and as much as is possible considering the events the film plays things out from a neutral vantage point. This is quite a feat. Not having the terrorists portrayed as evil caricatures must have been, I think, very difficult.

Everything is very mundane at first (as things usually are at an airport), showing folks sitting around waiting for their flights, talking on cell phones, working on laptops, etc. We see the arrival of the four Muslims at the airport and watch them go through security. One of them is shown to be carrying a knife, and he somehow gets through without a problem.

We catch little bits of conversation from passengers and crew, all very trivial, but that adds to the sense of reality about it all. Watching and listening to them talk about their plans for later on was for me, physically painful... knowing what was to come and that none of them would survive the day.

At the airport, the runway is backed up and they have approximately a 30 minute wait on the tarmac, which stresses the leader of the terrorists, since timing was critical to them on that day in order to terrorize everyone to maximum effect. The film takes place aboard the plane, at a central traffic control hub and at air traffic control at multiple locations. Also, part of it takes place at NORAD, where a training exercise is about to take place.

The events of the film seem to unfold in slow motion, as the first hints of a hijacking come to light to one of the air traffic controllers at first as a possible technical glitch, then a communications problem and then a bit of cockpit conversation heard that bodes ill and must be verified. At the time there had not been a hijacking in what? Two decades? So no one jumped up and scrambled on this, although it certainly was not taken lightly.

Seeing the World Trade Center towers in the skyline was gut-wrenching, knowing they would fall that day.

What becomes painfully clear is the lack of a pre-thought-out system to coordinate communications between the various agencies which had a need to know about this, including the military. The awareness of the seriousness of the situation seems to take a long time to build, although it was in reality probably less than an hour or so before everyone got in the groove.

Eventually we see the dreaded takeover of the flight, as the terrorists murder the pilot and co-pilot, and stab a passenger just to show they're serious. The frustration of the commanders at NORAD really comes across, as it seems that they might have been able to counter what was going on more quickly if channels had been more open. Yes, this might have involved shooting down the planes, and it's abundantly clear the anguish that possible decision had on those in charge. We also see the realization of the passengers that this is a suicide mission, and that if they're going to die they may as well try and take the plane.

We all know what happened, and as I stated, that makes the film that much more difficult to watch, but watch it we must, in order to remind us of what we are up against. Yes, I know there are some whack jobs scattered out there who think that the government blew up the WTC and shot down that plane, but they can go pack sand. Greengrass did extensive research on this and was in touch with as many family members as possible in order to properly pay homage to those men and women and to make this as accurate a portrayal as possible considering the circumstances.

You can feel the seriousness with which the actors took their roles, on both sides. This was no Die Hard take on the events: It was solemnly and tastefully done. As I sat through the credits I was astonished to see the number of people who portrayed themselves in the film, both at the air traffic control locations and at NORAD.

You need to go see this film. No, it's not fun... it's important.

United 93 is a 2006 drama-thriller directed by Paul Greengrass that portrays the events aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked during the September 11 attacks. The film reconstructs the hijacking and the passengers' brave attempt to regain control of the plane. Blending real-time sequences and documentary-style filmmaking, United 93 offers a poignant depiction of one of the tragic events from that day.

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