by SARAH ROWLAND

Sensationalistic. Too soon. Overdone. Exploitative. Racially dividing. Just plain old bad taste. There are countless reasons why not to make yet another movie about the doomed passengers of United Airlines Flight 93. But writer/director Paul Greengrass (writer of Omagh and director of The Bourne Supremacy) made one anyway. And I hate to report that it’s actually pretty damn good. Not to be confused with Flight 93—the substandard made-for-TV movie that broke all kinds of ratings records on A&E—United 93 is one of the most gut-wrenching, edge-of-your-seat suspense dramas to come along this year.

Based on interviews with the families of the passengers, members of the 9/11 Commission, air traffic controllers and military officials, Greengrass respectfully recreates the horror and confusion of those fateful 90 minutes before the Newark-San Francisco flight nose-dived into rural Pennsylvania.

As the fourth flight to crash and burn on Tuesday morning, there are many frustrating close calls to work with, and Greengrass takes full advantage—whether it’s the confused pilots not knowing how to interpret terrorists’ warnings or how the delayed plane took off just moments before ground control caught wind of multiple hijackings. Darting back and forth between various command posts, Greengrass offers viewers an omnipresent vantage point so we see how slowly thefragmented information was transferred to and from the military, the MIA president, air traffic controllers and the pilots.

Conversely, we get a real sense of how fast the passengers had to have processed the snippets of info trickling in through cell calls before making the decision to try to regain control of the plane. And even though we all know how that ended, Greengrass somehow keeps hope alive to the point where you find yourself wishing the situation will turnaround for these people.

His coup d’état, though, is when the second tower gets smoked. He brings you right back to that moment of disbelief, only this time you’re in the air-traffic control room trying to peek over someone’s shoulder to see what’s happening on the monitors.

Using these same shaky cameras from the get-go sets us up for the chaos that is about to ensue (a trick he must have picked up in the Omagh bomb scene), but he also juxtaposes the disarray with the everyday useless interjections that strangers tend to exchange on planes. At times you feel as though these Average Joes (as played by no-names) could just as easily be flying a boring old WestJet flight to Vancouver—there’s nothing special about them. Which serves as a poignant reminder of how surreal it must have been for the people onboard Flight 93, not to mention their loved ones at home getting the “honey-our-plane-has-been-hijacked-tell-the-kids-I-love-them” call.

This brings us to the question: Does anyone really want to spend a night at the movies being reminded of the 9/11 tragedy? Forget doing anything else after; you’ll be too depressed. And then there’s the whole Muslims-bad, Americans-good underpinning—just ask one of the film’s leads, British-based Iraqi actor Lewis Alsamari. He was denied entry into the U.S. for the New York premiere of his own film—hmmm, could this have something to do with the colour of his skin?

So, while incredibly entertaining and powerful, there is an undeniable sense of guilt attached to this pleasure—not only that, but it will temporarily take all the fun out of U.S.-bashing and that’s never a good thing.

United 93 opens April 28

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