'United 93' is powerfully real

There's no way to watch United 93, Paul Greengrass' heartbreaking, pulse-pounding drama about the lone hijacked commercial airliner that failed to reach its target on Sept. 11, 2001, and not anticipate the dreadful outcome.

There's also no way to watch United 93 and not relive the surreal horror of the World Trade Center attacks and the jet that hit the Pentagon.

And there's no way to watch this extraordinarily powerful film and not be in awe of what human beings are capable of - both good and bad.

Already the subject of two TV movies and a shelf of books, the story of the 40 passengers and crew members aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco - and the four hijackers who seized the plane - could easily have been an exercise in exploitation, in jingoism. But Greengrass, a British director who has made a clutch of TV news documentaries and Bloody Sunday, the feature about the 1972 Northern Ireland shootings of 13 unarmed civilians, has couched United 93 in unwaveringly realistic terms.

Even when specific events and actions are a matter of supposition, United 93 remains visceral and unvarnished. With a screenplay based on interviews with government, military and commercial aviation officials, on the report of the 9/11 Commission, and on talks with the surviving family members of the passengers and crew, Greengrass delivers a wrenching chronicle of an everyday airplane ride that goes frighteningly awry near Shanksville, Pa.

There are the businessmen and women on their cell phones and laptops, idling in the airport waiting area before the flight begins. There are the pilot and copilot making small talk as they run down the cockpit checklist. There are the attendants, glad at the prospect of working an uncrowded flight, trading gossip, checking supplies.

And there are the four young Arab men, first seen in early morning in a hotel room bowing in prayer to Mecca, then going through the airport X-rays and scanners, then taking their seats on the Boeing 757.

Cast with unknown actors and, in several cases, with the real FAA managers, air traffic controllers and military technicians who were working the morning of 9/11, trying to make sense of the missing radar blips and intercepted calls, United 93 is, in many ways, an educated guess of a movie.

The facts: Passengers telephone friends and loved ones, reporting in hushed tones that they've been hijacked; in turn, they are informed of the TV news flashes about two giant airliners rocketing into the twin towers. It is no great leap to conclude that their plane, and their hijackers, are on a similar mission.

The hypothesis: that a group of passengers, one of them a judo champion and another a former athlete, decides to charge the terrorists and retake the cockpit.

United 93 takes that scenario and runs with it. Having cut back and forth between the plane and the airport towers, traffic control centers and Northeast Air Defense headquarters on the ground - describing the communication lapses and panicky chaos that ensued - Greengrass keeps the last 30 minutes of the film in real time, inside the United jet.

Made with enormous respect for the real passengers (and their surviving friends and family), United 93 also manages to portray the four hijackers as something more than cutout jihadist madmen. In one small but telling, and compelling, sequence, Greengrass intercuts shots of passengers reciting the Lord's Prayer with shots of the hijackers murmuring Islamic incantations.

It's Greengrass' way of asking a question that looms large in these post-9/11 days: Are we all praying to the same God, or is one man's God better than another, and one man's God vastly more terrifying?

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.

United 93 **** (out of four stars)

Produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lloyd Levin and Paul Greengrass, written and directed by Greengrass, photography by Barry Ackroyd, music by John Powell, distributed by Universal Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 51 mins.

Todd Beamer. . . David Alan Basche

Sandra Bradshaw. . . Trish Gates

Ahmed Al Haznawi. . . Omar Berdouni

Ben Sliney. . . himself

Jeremy Glick. . . Peter Hermann

Parent's guide: R (real-life violence, profanity, adult themes)

Playing at: area theaters