Saw it on A&E last night and the only thing that drew me in was the curiosity of how much worse it might get. All the shots of innocent children playing were gratuitous and emotionally manipulative. The opening scenes of the baggage inspectors being so thorough was a bit contrived (apparently they were doing a better job back then than they do now). I got the sense that one of the goals of this film was to exculpate the federal government for its complacency, which after all is almost as much to blame for 9/11 as the hijackers. The hijackers were one-dimensional characters, almost like video game characters. There is no effort to show what their motives might have been, or to show that actual people did these things. I might be accused of sympathizing with the terrorists, but the fact is that they had a rationale (twisted as it was) for doing what they did, and if we are to end terrorism, we need to know and understand why it happens. I also couldn't identify with any of the passengers. Perhaps if the film makers spent less effort portraying the idyllic lives they lost (beautiful homes, beautiful children--did they really all live in tree-lined mansions in the countryside with angelic children) and spent more time on character development, it would have brought the pathos home. The Lord's Prayer sequence was particularly crass. If this wasn't based on a real event, it would simply have been an utterly forgettable B disaster movie not worth commenting on. As it is, this movie is a poor tribute to those who died that day, and a ghoulish attempt to satisfy our curiosity for what it might have been like to be on the plane that day rather than help us understand what happened and why.
