I know 9/11 is still a sensitive issue and people won't go see it, but is anyone going to see it? I know I will because I have a mini obssession with 9/11 (I watched the A&E movie, the Discovery Channel special, and downloaded ABC's live coverage on 9/11). I also plan on seeing the other 9/11 movies.

The movie is getting great reviews:

Link to listen to Ebert & Roeper's review: http://tvplex.go.com/buenavista/ebertandro...ml?CMP=AFC-ERTV

http://www.showbizdata.com/contacts/pickne...ED_93</I>

MOVIE REVIEWS: UNITED 93

Tuesday, April 25 2006

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In his review of United 93 appearing today (Tuesday), New York Post critic Lou Lumenick comments, "It's a long, brutal and honest look at a shattering event some Americans would apparently prefer not to see depicted -- but also a respectful, inspiring one that's in no way exploitative or emotionally manipulative." Gene Seymour in Newsday calls it a "persuasive account" of what actually occurred aboard the one plane that did not hit its target. "As many have feared, the movie is also wrenching to both the heart and the viscera, but those who choose to see it will be deeply, honestly moved," he writes. Claudia Puig in USA Today rates it with four stars and calls it "undeniably the most gut-wrenching and captivating film released this year." David Denby writes in The New Yorker: "United 93 is a tremendous experience of fear, bewilderment, and resolution, and, when you replay the movie in your head afterward, you are likely to think that [writer/director Paul] Greengrass made all the right choices."

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/movie/...87_1_0_,00.html

Entertainment Weekly: A-

Humans are drawn to looking at the unwatchable as a way of cheating death. At least, that's what I told myself to prepare for watching United 93, a harrowing, documentary-style reenactment, in real time, of what might have happened on the one airplane that didn't fulfill the terrorists' intended goals on Sept. 11, 2001. We willingly look at terrible things, often over and over — real footage of war and dramatizations, actual catastrophes and historical re-creations, the tragic outcomes of which are never in doubt — for the thrill of being alive. Perhaps we're as astonished by our own good fortune as we are horrified by the worse fates of others who could just as well have been us. We grieve, we resolve, we call loved ones, we replay the images, humbled by our own relief.

Movies are the perfect medium for this exercise in gratitude — they always have been, with the screen so big and the audience so huddled together. And the world has never felt more precarious, or the distinctions between the lucky and the unlucky more tenuous, than they did on the day the World Trade Center fell, the Pentagon was attacked, and one Boeing 757 crashed near Shanksville, Pa., diverted by doomed passengers who died yanking control away from their captors' hands.

To his great credit, British writer-director Paul Greengrass knows this, and keeps a cataclysmic story scaled to the vulnerable men and women involved. The result is a movie experience that's undeniably agonizing — but also unexpectedly bracing in ways I couldn't have prepared for. Pulling the bandage of sentiment cleanly away from oozing concepts like ''heroism'' and ''our nation's war on terror'' in the aftermath of recent wounds, here's a drama about the most politically charged crisis of our time that grants the dignity of autonomy to every soul involved. In this telling, each passenger has a life that began long before he or she boarded the aircraft, not a mere representation of citizenry. Each hijacker is a man with a temperament and a religious conviction, not a cartoon monster. Todd Beamer (played by David Alan Basche) utters his now-famous ''Let's roll'' as a brief organizational statement to fellow passengers in on the plans to disarm the terrorists, not as a booming call to patriotism. No wonder so many guys from aviation were willing to play themselves in the re-creation. Perhaps they too wanted to cheat death by revisiting that day of unfathomable national chaos.

It is, indeed, the awesomeness of puny human size that is newest and most riveting about United 93 — the way the filmmaker focuses on the ''averageness'' of people who, unlike those who watch and remember some five years later, must scramble to make sense of incomprehensible events in the moment. (Greengrass first got at this shared smallness in Bloody Sunday, his acclaimed 2002 film of the deadly clash between civil rights demonstrators and British troops in Northern Ireland in 1972.) And so, in the beginning, attention moves casually from the prayerful preparations of the hijackers to the routine of morning activity among flight controllers, airplane crew, and the everybodies flying from here to there.

The movie is tightly built, but Greengrass is patient, letting events unfold at the pace of reality, noticing the splendor of dailiness — the way FAA honcho Ben Sliney (who plays himself) receives a standard air traffic briefing, the way flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw (played by Trish Gates, who worked for United herself) changes into heels after takeoff. (Even those professional actors recognizable from their screen and New York stage work — among them Christian Clemenson, Denny Dillon, John Rothman, and Chip Zien — manage to vanish into the real people they play.) And when we see that second plane smash into the Twin Towers — as those in the control tower at Newark did, and everyone watching TV did too — the sight is as dreadful and sickening as if we were seeing it for the first time. But then Greengrass gets back to the still-living, hanging in the air. Decisions need to be made at the various flight centers, with little confirmed information to go on. At the Northeast Air Defense Sector in upstate New York, commanders trained to take action scramble to establish a chain of command that will let them plan a response. On that last doomed plane, passengers begin to make those phone calls home that have come to stand as testaments. The final struggle takes only a few minutes, but it feels like an eternity, a blur of action, the deadly outcome of which cannot be changed by wishing it otherwise.

Do we need to see this? No. There's no right or wrong way to remember 9/11, no shame in skipping the movie-fied sight or prize for those who dare to look. Do we benefit from recognizing, in United 93, that there's no difference between those who died and us, in fear and in courage? Absolutely.

USA Today: 4 stars

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/review...united-93_x.htm

Wrenching 'United 93' is harrowing in its realism

By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

United 93 (* * * * out of four) is an unflinching, powerfully visceral and haunting portrait of the tragic events aboard one of the terrorist-commandeered flights on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Painstakingly researched from reports of flight recordings, air traffic controllers and aviation officials, as well as cellphone calls made to family members by some of the passengers, it is undeniably the most gut-wrenching and captivating film released this year.

What writer/director Paul Greengrass has re-created is not only the devastating human drama aboard the flight but also the reaction of authorities on land as they become acutely aware of — and powerless to stop — the horror of the developments.

Filmed in real time and shot with handheld cameras, it has the urgency and grit of a documentary rather than a big-studio movie. We will never know exactly what transpired aboard that flight, but United 93 gives us an educated guess.

The response of the passengers is not always courageous and inspiring; some cried or shrank from acts of bravery. But it always is riveting. Though the film doesn't attempt to soften the painful blow, it emerges as a viable memorial to the 44 people on board, several of whom tried to fight the terrorists.

The cast is a revelation. Greengrass wisely chose to use a half-dozen of the real players to augment the sense of verisimilitude. Most noteworthy is Ben Sliney, in charge of the FAA's command center, who helps make the story feel revealing and accurate.

The director's choice of unfamiliar actors, as opposed to stars, to play the passengers and crew also adds to the sense that we are watching real people fight for their lives.

Greengrass was an inspired choice for a believable and harrowing depiction of that awful day. The British director created one of the most entertaining and intelligent action movies in recent memory, 2004's The Bourne Supremacy, and 2002's emotional cinéma vérité-style film Bloody Sunday, a chronicle of Irish demonstrators killed by British troops in 1972.

Like Bloody Sunday, United 93 is palpably tense and uncomfortable to watch but nonetheless compelling. The film also is terrifyingly suspenseful, especially since we know the outcome. But it's not the denouement that keeps us transfixed. It is the exploration of events that lead to it that shatter our emotions and mesmerize us.

http://www.thehollywoodreporter.com/thr/re...t_id=1002383139

United 93

By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: Unflinching account of the terror aboard the fourth hijacked plane on Sept. 11 provokes deep, disturbing emotions.

Press notes for motion pictures are usually filled with dispensable, self-congratulatory puffery, but the one for the soul-searing film "United 93" contains this trenchant comment from its English writer-director, Paul Greengrass: Speaking of the 40 individuals aboard United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth hijacked plane on that day of infamy, Sept. 11, 2001, he notes that these were the only passengers and crew members on any of those ill-fated flights who knew about the other planes having been used as weapons and realized what was happening to them. "They were the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world," Greengrass says. These were the first to react to the worldwide conflict we find ourselves in today. Within the microcosm of that reaction, Greengrass has made an emphatic political document, a movie about defiance against tyranny and terrorism.

How many moviegoers will be willing to endure "United 93"? I suspect many will, but what that adds up to in terms of boxoffice is anybody's guess. Understandably, controversy engulfs this film. Is now the right time for such a film? Why make the film at all? These are legitimate questions. No one possesses a "right" answer. But Greengrass has made not only a thoroughly fact-checked film but a film that incontrovertibly comes from the heart.

Greengrass wants the 91 minutes United 93 was in the air to speak to our tenuous situation in a scary, riven world. A previous film by him anticipates this work. The invaluable "Bloody Sunday" (2002), shot as if it were made by a camera crew at the time, dramatized a 1972 incident in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, where 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were shot and killed by British soldiers. Here again he takes a hard look at a cataclysmic event to provoke dialogue.

To keep things as accurate as possible, Greengrass reportedly interviewed more than 100 family members and friends of those who perished. He hired flight attendants and commercial airline pilots to play those roles; hired several civilian and military controllers on duty on Sept. 11, including the FAA's Ben Sliney, to play themselves; culled facts from the 9/11 Commission Report; and rehearsed and shot his actors in an old Boeing 757 at England's Pinewood Studios.

Even Barry Ackroyd's hand-held cinematography, John Powell's muted, anxious score and the plane set fixed to computer-controlled motion gimbals to simulate the pitch and roll of the aircraft urge the viewer to think of this as a you-are-there experience. Yet no one really knows what happened on United 93. We have evidence from phone calls made from the plane and those interviews, but that's where it ends. And that is where an artist can pick up the story.

This is what it probably was like, and the experience overwhelms. Time passes in weird ways. The four nervous terrorists wait seemingly forever to make their move. The panicked passengers wait seemingly forever to make theirs. Helplessness engulfs us, then determination takes hold.

During these breathless moments, Greengrass cuts away to the desperation and confusion in airport control towers, the FAA's overwhelmed operations command center in Herndon, Va., and the military's unprepared operations center at the Northeast Air Defense Sector in upstate New York. For all their monitors and electronic equipment, there is a horrific, low-tech moment when controllers at Newark Airport get a perfect view across the Hudson of the second plane hitting a World Trade Center tower. No one can even speak.

In years to come, United 93 may enter our mythology in ways unimaginable. But for now, we have a starting point. "United 93" is a sincere attempt to pull together the known facts and guesses at the emotional truths as best anyone can. Then, in the movie's final moments, the impact of the heroism aboard United 93 becomes startlingly clear.

I definitely plan on seeing this. Yes, its a movie experience that will be very hard to endure, but it really happened, and from what I hear, the writer and director met with the victims' families and received their blessing.

Those people gave their all to stop their hijackers, and hopefully this movie will be universally looked at as a tribute and not exploitative trash.

I definitely plan on seeing this. Yes, its a movie experience that will be very hard to endure, but it really happened, and from what I hear, the writer and director met with the victims' families and received their blessing.

Those people gave their all to stop their hijackers, and hopefully this movie will be universally looked at as a tribute and not exploitative trash.

I will be going to see this as well when it is released here in Australia.

I still remember what I was thinking the morning I woke up and turned on my TV to see what was happening. All I wanted was to be in New York to help. I remember feeling really helpless.

I was In NY in 97 and my amoungst my prized possessions are the few photo's that I have of the twin towers from Liberty Island.

Edith

Do we know if any of the money coming in from the box office will go to any charity or group supporting families of victims of 9/11 - or to rebuild the WTC? I'd like to see it, however it'll be very hard for me to watch. I just hope the money goes to something worthwhile though.

10% of opening weekend gross goes to victim's families (I think)

I'd like to see it!!

I dunno if I'll see it in theaters, but I will definently see it eventually. It looks great.