The sad moral of this drama-documentary is that those who eventually fought back did so far too late. It's like being on a night-bus at 3am in the capital when one person goes mental and attacks someone else at random; everyone else sits still, sheepish, too scared of being attacked themselves to intervene. This is precisely what happened on Flight 93, the Flight that Fought Back.
The film is a great reconstruction of the events of the day, right from the very beginning when the passengers leave home in the morning, just a routine day, to the last minute with one late arrival running desperately to catch the plane, even shouting 'Hold the plane'. How he must wish he'd missed the plane after all. What about the people who by last-minute chance DIDN'T catch the plane (there were only 33 passengers on board from a capacity of perhaps 250)? The Arab hijackers are all stock, cartoon characters, totally clichéd though presumably realistic, given the events that later unfolded. In a way, the terrorists successfully exploited the cowardice that is all too common in modern society everyone looks after their own little life, like a particle of sediment in the great pint of beer that is society, slowly sinking to the bottom hoping they won't be spilt; hoping they can contribute to the wanton drunkenness that Western society is becoming.
The astonishing thing about this film is how a bunch of brawny, six feet two Americans massively built, powerful men as shown in the photographs could whimper in the face of some puny Arabs. Okay, so they might have had a bomb. Is this really why they waited till the last minute too late, with the cockpit door locked before intervening? It's pathetic.
Overall, the film is like a mixture of the excellent BBC drama-documentary series Days that Shook the World which features dramatic reconstructions of similarly epic events in world history and something like the film 9/11 (2002) on the NYFD when the planes struck the Twin Towers. But it combines this with fascinating, though sentimental, interviews with the forlorn friends and relatives of some of the survivors (except of the Arab terrorists, of course, even though their relatives may have shed some light on what makes these maniacs act).
There are interesting split-screen sections showing what was happening at various points simultaneously, and a good narration from Keifer Sutherland, the star of 24 to whom some reviewers have compared this film.
Of course, the 'reconstruction' side of the film, for all we know, may be absolute rubbish. Do cell phones really function from thousands of feet in the air, at 500 mph? Was the plane shot down by a US Air Force fighter? We may never know.
Unlike the Naudet brothers film, 9/11 (2002), which is almost entirely unadulterated documentary, this film is almost entirely dramatised, showing only very short clips of stock aeroplanes, plus some footage on the day of 9/11 around the Twin Towers, and so forth.
This is no forensic reconstruction of what probably happened on Flight 93, just a fairy tale of what many would like to have seen happen based on spurious cell phone calls made to friends and relatives on the ground and links between the cockpit and airspace control.
The sad thing is the almost total anti-climax of the final scenes, when the 'brave' passengers are merely bashing a tea trolley against a closed, very tough cockpit door. All to no avail.
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