British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, in the vein of his docudrama Bloody Sunday, has done a thoroughgoing job of imagining how the events of 9/11 might have unfolded, a much more thorough job of it than most mere newspaper readers and TV news watchers will have done for themselves; and he has maintained a respectable level of integrity in his placement of stress on the "docu" in preference to the "drama," his reliance on the vérité conventions of scrappy camerawork, jittery cutting, and grainy film stock, his avoidance of cheap theatrics, his employment of a no-name cast in what are inevitably one-note characterizations, including several actual participants in the events, re-enacting unhistrionically their own roles in them. (It is odd to recognize, for the rare exception, the U.S. President from The Sentinel, David Rasche, among the passengers of Flight 93.) The power, to be sure, is not so much created, not so much generated, by the filmmaker as it is inherent in the material: the initial obliviousness to impending doom, the later helplessness to avert it. Though there is doubtless a kind of exploitation in that, it is not for purposes of greed. The area in which the collective imagination of moviegoers is apt to be found most wanting, most needful of filling-in, is in the gradual awakening to the crisis in the assorted control towers and command centers ("Sir, we have a real-world situation here"). As long as Greengrass is cross-cutting between these and the titular airplane -- the one scheduled to go from Newark to San Francisco, the one that ultimately went down in rural Pennsylvania en route to Pennsylvania Avenue -- the film has its best opportunities to raise gooseflesh. Once the third hijacked plane has hit the Pentagon, after the two earlier have hit the Twin Towers, Greengrass gives up any further cross-cutting and settles in inside the fourth and final plane, where he can add little to our own imagination, except insofar as he forces upon us a full sense of the duration of events. The horror of these will be somewhat muted by the frenetic imprecision of the camera. Ben Sliney, Maj. James Fox, David Alan Basche, Trish Gates. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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