Hollywood’s difficulty making a great 9/11 movie begins with an unreasonable expectation: that one film should reconstruct the attacks, honor the dead, explain their historical significance, and leave viewers with something resembling resolution. Those responsibilities do not fit comfortably together. Yet the claim that Hollywood has never succeeded deserves resistance. In my judgment, United 93 is a great film precisely because its strongest passages refuse that impossible assignment.
Written and directed by Paul Greengrass and released in 2006, it concentrates on people trying to understand an emergency while it is happening. Its achievement is narrower than a definitive account of September 11, and more disturbing than a conventional story of courage rewarded. It asks what action looks like when knowledge arrives in fragments and survival cannot be promised.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses the film’s phone calls, passenger resistance, and ending. It also distinguishes the dramatization from what can be established about the actual flight.
The problem with asking one movie to explain 9/11
A familiar disaster movie gives viewers an emotional contract. We meet a manageable group of characters, discover their private conflicts, and watch catastrophe bring those conflicts to a head. Even when someone dies, the structure usually gives that death a clear dramatic purpose.
Applied to September 11, that machinery can become troubling. A carefully arranged reconciliation may make tragedy feel narratively useful. A victorious climax may suggest that courage compensates for loss. A sweeping explanation may flatten people into illustrations of a political argument.
These are critical concerns, not proof that a particular genre is incapable of addressing the attacks. Intimacy, suspense, and even consolation can be earned. But a film needs to recognize the difference between helping viewers comprehend an experience and making the experience conveniently comprehensible.
The connection between individual perspective and public history also runs through our discussion of performance and political cinema. Here, that relationship carries an especially difficult burden: the characters represent people whose lives exceeded anything the screenplay could contain.
United 93 makes the group its central character
Greengrass largely withholds the biographical introductions that would organize a conventional ensemble drama. Passengers do not arrive equipped with neatly announced problems that the flight will resolve. Their relative anonymity initially resembles the ordinary experience of traveling among strangers.
That choice can create emotional distance. Viewers who need sustained access to one person’s interior life may find the approach limiting. But I find that limitation central to the film’s integrity. It does not pretend that a few efficient scenes could make us know these people fully.
Instead, character emerges through changing behavior. The passengers’ collective movement from terror toward resistance supplies the dramatic development. Listening, exchanging information, and deciding to cooperate become consequential actions. Bravery develops within fear rather than replacing it.
The absence of a single commanding protagonist also changes how we look. We scan faces and attend to small interactions instead of waiting for the designated hero to take charge. Responsibility moves among people. The film’s title consequently describes more than a location: the flight becomes a temporary community whose members must act together.
The controllers experience a different kind of helplessness
On the ground, the air traffic control sequences turn professional competence into a source of tension. People accustomed to interpreting information and coordinating movement encounter a situation that their existing procedures cannot readily contain.
From their perspective, the catastrophe does not arrive as a completed historical account. It arrives through communications, uncertainty, and attempts to determine what is happening elsewhere. The audience knows the broad outcome; the people inside the scenes do not. That difference makes routine exchanges painful.
Ben Sliney, the FAA operations manager, plays himself. His presence gives the workplace scenes a particular texture, but the deeper achievement is structural. The film shows how being responsible for a system does not mean possessing a complete view of it.
This is where the editing matters most to my reading. Moving between locations expands our awareness without giving the people onscreen the same advantage. We can see the separation between their efforts. They must work inside it.
Why the simplest words carry the most weight
“I love you” becomes one of the film’s most unsettling phrases. Its use around a hijacker’s early telephone call and the passengers’ later calls creates a difficult juxtaposition. Ordinary language remains ordinary in vocabulary while becoming unbearable in context.
That juxtaposition does not make the callers morally equivalent. Instead, it challenges the comforting idea that murderous intent must announce itself through an unmistakably alien appearance or manner. The film’s depiction of the hijackers is frightening partly because they occupy recognizable human spaces and perform recognizable gestures.
For the passengers, telephone communication changes both their understanding and their choices. The outside world reaches the cabin through voices. What might normally be a casual connection becomes a means of learning, deciding, and saying what cannot wait.
Later, “Let’s roll” receives restrained treatment rather than the grand delivery of an action-movie catchphrase. The words matter because of the action surrounding them. Their brevity leaves room for fear, urgency, and collective commitment.
That restraint is worth listening for. A louder performance could invite applause at exactly the point when the film needs us to remain aware of the people facing danger.
The ending reveals the limits of reconstruction
The final struggle is also where admiration needs qualification. The film gives physical form to events that cannot be reconstructed in every detail. Its presentation of the passengers’ assault and the cockpit struggle should not be mistaken for a complete visual record of what happened.
A convincing performance or immediate camera style cannot eliminate that distinction. Indeed, the more present-tense the filmmaking feels, the easier it becomes to forget that choices have been made about movement, timing, and individual behavior.
This creates a tension the movie cannot entirely resolve. Showing the resistance honors the passengers’ agency. Giving it a specific choreography risks making uncertain details feel settled. For me, that is the film’s most significant vulnerability.
Nevertheless, the ending denies the familiar release in which physical courage restores safety. We witness determination without receiving the reassurance that determination is enough. The absence of that reward is essential to the film’s emotional force.
Greatness does not require a complete explanation
United 93 offers limited historical context and little sustained exploration of the attacks’ aftermath. Those omissions matter if a viewer wants an explanatory account of September 11. They matter differently when judging a film organized around the experience of incomplete knowledge.
Our character-focused guide to films about power and identity approaches another useful question: who gets to determine the shape of someone’s life? Here, the passengers’ resistance becomes an attempt to reclaim action within circumstances imposed on them.
My deeper reading is that the film separates agency from control. Its people can make meaningful choices without controlling the outcome. That is a harsher, more honest conception of courage than the promise that bravery will deliver rescue.
Calling for a definitive 9/11 movie can obscure this achievement. No single perspective can stand in for everyone who experienced the attacks or their consequences. United 93 matters because it gives one terrible span of time sustained attention. Its greatness, for me, lies in making collective action visible while leaving the loss unresolved.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 11, 2026 at 16:15:23 PDT (Los Angeles time)
