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United 93 (Widescreen Edition)
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List Price: $14.98
Our Price: $10.49
Your Save: $ 4.49 ( 30% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: David Alan Basche, Olivia Thirlby, Liza Colón-Zayas, J.J. Johnson, Gary Commock
Directed By: Paul Greengrass
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Universal
EAN: 0025192657023
Format: AC-3
Label: Universal Studios
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Universal Studios
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2006-09-05
Running Time: 111
Studio: Universal Studios
Theatrical Release Date: 2006-04-28
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Editorial Reviews:
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A defining day in our history. It's an event that shook the world. Honest, unflinching and profoundly moving, United 93 tells the unforgettable story of the heroic passengers and crew members who prevented the terrorists from carrying out their plans for the fourth hijacked plane on September 11, 2001. As on-ground military and civilian teams scrambled to make sense of the unfolding events, forty people sat down as strangers found the courage to stand up as one.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: 3.5 stars out of 4
Comment: The Bottom Line:
United 93 manages to work as an incredibly skillfull thriller, building a great deal of tension up to a climax, and as a testament to those who lost their lives on 9/11; either way you slice it it's quite a film.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Courage in the face of horror and confusion
Comment: Writer / director Paul Greengrass presents a plausible imagining of events aboard the ill-fated United Flight 93, which went down in a grassy field after the passengers stormed the cockpit rather than allow the hijackers to pursue their objective unchallenged. This story is interwoven with the events in various control rooms as air traffic controllers and military personnel gradually realize what is happening and find to their horror that they are unprepared to stop it.
This film keeps a tight focus on the events of the day, thereby honoring the memories of the fallen by keeping our attention on their plight and their reaction to it, rather than making political points about the big picture. There is no mention of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, or Iraq. The audience becomes observers at the various locations and learns nothing that the actual participants would not have known. We learn nothing more of the passengers on United 93 than we would if we were fellow travelers on the same flight. The result is far more powerful than if the filmmakers had strained for effect through trumped up sentimental backstories or political proselytizing. We are presented with a day of horror and confusion and the nobility of average people struggling to confront it with courage and dignity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Truely Moving Film
Comment: This is a very well put together movie. Emotional, heart rending and devestating. The ending either brings tears to my eyes or makes me cry, without fail every time I watch it. The vision of the ground rushing up to meet you and then blackness really sticks in your mind.
Customer Rating:
Summary: United 93
Comment: This is a respectful, well-acted, honest, and as scrupulously accurate a cinematic account of the tragic flight of United 93 as we are probably ever going to see. For the few of you who don't know (and for you "Truthers" who disrespectfully call people "sheeple"), United 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on September 11, 2001. The plane was turned toward Washington DC by the terrorists, but it never got there, instead crashing into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. As far as we can tell, the passengers attempted to seize the plane from the hijackers, who drove it a full speed straight into the earth. No one survived.
Some of what we see onscreen is necessarily supposition, based on ambient sounds in cellphone and airphone calls made by the passengers. We'll never know if the passengers succeeded in taking the plane even for a moment, but I like to think so.
People have said that this film is exploitative. They are, of course, welcome to their opinions, but there is nothing exploitative about UNITED 93, any more than there was anything exploitative about APOLLO 13. Film has become a medium for reporting history, hopefully responsibly.
"9/11 Truthers," in love with conspiracy theories, advance the idea that the government planned the entire incident, but their "facts" are made of inference upon inference, skewed to acheive a particular result. Bushworld did not need 9/11 to advance it's Preemptive War Doctrine; any of a score of minor incidents would have sufficed. Hitler started World War II over a border incident at Gleiwitz, a phony incident in which German soldiers battled other German soldiers masquerading as Polish soldiers. A few phony mannequin soldiers were even "killed."
But there was certainly nothing phony about the deaths on 9/11.
The media and the establishment have made "heroes" out of the Flight 93 passengers, but this both embellishes and obscures the truth. Americans tend to like their "heroes" larger than life, infallible, brave beyond reckoning, and unblemished, the types of mythic figures of which we make statues.
Yet we forget that the true heroes are everyday people, like fathers and mothers who go to work each day, return home each night, and dedicate their lives to the kids and to little things like painting the garage, and people who keep on with an exhausting and impossible task to the end no matter the result.
The Flight 93 passengers are these kinds of heroes, heroes without quotation marks.
After hearing the news that the World Trade Center and The Pentagon had been attacked, realizing that they themselves were doomed if they did nothing, and faced with the reality that they most likely would die anyway, they fought back against the zeal-infected hijackers with airline cutlery, hot water, and sheer determination. Flight 93 became a manned cruise missile, a kamikaze mission, and a battleground on which a group of ordinary, terrified people transcended fear in order to take back what had been taken from them, their lives. That they died in no way diminishes what they accomplished.
This film is a fitting memorial to them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Remembrance
Comment: I saw this late last night and have to say, I watched it knowing I wouldn't be able to sleep afterwards and wanting to stop watching. Hard to do though, such is the grip the director exerts.
Of course, the story itself is so deeply compelling that even if it had been badly made it would have been dificult to switch off. The sense of "this could just as easily have happened to me" is overwhelming.
We all have memories of that day, and one of mine is of a little snippet of the confusion: at one point the media was announcing that a bomb/plane had hit the State Department, a story that disappeared without trace within hours. That confusion, when it is not clear what is true and what is not, is well-captured here - particularly among the air-traffic controllers.
After the second plane hit no one knew whether there was just one more to come or fifty. Of the thousands of planes flying over the US, any number could have been potential missiles. And clearly, no one had ever envisaged the possibility of something like this happening, so for a moment all the experts and professionals were lost in a "what do we do now" helplessness.
The sheer courage of the passengers in rebelling should never be underestimated. It would have been remarkable even if there had been previous, similar hijackings, and from the beginning it had been obvious what was going on. In the heat of that terrible moment, in which almost everyone else was dumbfounded or paralysed, it was truly extraordinary.
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