United 93

[Rodia]

One of my problems with the movie is that the trailer for it wasn't sober and restrained. When I saw it in the theater it took me, and quite a bit of the rest of the audience, a few moments to realize what it was about because the trailer so strongly resembled that of a typical action movie trailer. Camera work and editing like you would see in one of the Bourne movies, or an MTV produced flick. If they had had the same images but no sound, or simply a black screen with a voice or text describing what the movie was, my reaction against it might not have been so violent. As it was, when I finally figured out what the movie was about from the trailer, I gasped it disbelief, as did much of the audience in the theater.

I hated that so much.

It doesn't hit as close to home here. You know what happens when we see a trailer like that? People shrug and say 'Sheesh, of course Hollywood starts making money off tragedies'. But in their minds, Hollywood=America... and the whole thing is trivialised, put on a funny and pompous US pedestal like so many other things. We don't get you that well, America, with all the speeches and flags and family values and men in suits talking about RIGHTS!!!111 and PROTECTION!!!111 with the stars and stripes billowing in the background...so the WTC tragedy gets filed away with all your other local memories that we will watch movies about, but won't really care for. Civil War, Vietnam, some bombing or another somewhere in a state we can't point out on the map...

To the average Eastern European, America is the land of fiction. Everything gets made into a movie, and movies always lie.

So I'm really pissed off that no one thought to make this very important film resound as truth. I'll go see it because I want to know whether it's just a movie, or a serious memorial...but the prep they gave the audiences with those trailers says 'just a movie'.

Grr.

(I remember when I saw 25th hour for the first time....now that's touching on the subject in a striking manner, and not even making it the focus of the film. Chilled me to the bone.)

[Frelga]

It's hard for some people who curse freely to believe that there are others who express themselves quite easily without it.

I think I found me a new sig line.

She said, not having anything constructive to contribute to the debate.

Except possibly this bit:

"Yeah, but your mate Dave says the government always hushes things up, Nobby," said Fred."
"Well, they do."
"Except he always gets to hear about 'em, and he never gets hushed up," said Fred.

I don't know if it is or isn't too early to make a movie about Flight 93. It's just is too early for me to see it.

[Primula Baggins]

Sorry. . . .

Edit: Finally on the third reading I get what you were saying, Frelga. I thought you were annoyed by my post, so I deleted it. I apologize for that. Life lately has been fraught.

[Alatar]

Not sure what this has to offer on the subject but I suppose it's worth linking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_93_%28film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

Vison,

I was not offended at the Oliver Stone comment, rather the "Elvis and his mum" comments, which were insulting.

Its not worth a fight though. Lets just drop it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Vison,

I was not offended at the Oliver Stone comment, rather the "Elvis and his mum" comments, which were insulting.

I had somehow missed that post. Yes, that is insulting.

[Lidless]

Interesting links. Sounds like the movie should have been three minutes longer.

[vison]

thot I already did this

[JewelSong]

[Ethel]

The transcript does have the hijackers talking about the passengers trying to get into the cockpit. They even talk about cutting off the cabin oxygen to stop them. You can read it here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,191520,00.html

Relatives of some of those killed were allowed to listen to the cockpit voice recorder - so if the transcript is fake, the recording must have been too.

I do not see why the administration would have lied about shooting the plane down if that's what they did. They were criticized pretty relentlessly in the wake of 9/11 for not scrambling air defenses sooner. It was widely believed that the target of the Flight 93 hijackers was either the Capitol or the White House. There was every reason to shoot it down, and no reason not to - and therefore, in my mind, no reason to lie about it if that's what happened.

We know from the cell phone calls that the passengers knew about the other hijackings and were determined to rush the cockpit. The words "Let's roll" were actually heard on a cell phone call. The transcript suggests that the passengers did not actually succeed in getting into the cabin. If you believe the transcript, it would seem that the hijackers either deliberately crashed the plane, or possibly were so rattled by the attempted assault they crashed it accidentally. It's impossible to tell.

You would be hard pressed to find a person who dislikes and distrusts the Bush administration more than I do. I just don't happen to believe the allegation that Flight 93 was shot down. I don't believe it because I see no reason to lie about it. It would have been the right thing to do.

[vison]

The transcript does have the hijackers talking about the passengers trying to get into the cockpit. They even talk about cutting off the cabin oxygen to stop them. You can read it here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,191520,00.html

Relatives of some of those killed were allowed to listen to the cockpit voice recorder - so if the transcript is fake, the recording must have been too.

I do not see why the administration would have lied about shooting the plane down if that's what they did. They were criticized pretty relentlessly in the wake of 9/11 for not scrambling air defenses sooner. It was widely believed that the target of the Flight 93 hijackers was either the Capitol or the White House. There was every reason to shoot it down, and no reason not to - and therefore, in my mind, no reason to lie about it if that's what happened.

We know from the cell phone calls that the passengers knew about the other hijackings and were determined to rush the cockpit. The words "Let's roll" were actually heard on a cell phone call. The transcript suggests that the passengers did not actually succeed in getting into the cabin. If you believe the transcript, it would seem that the hijackers either deliberately crashed the plane, or possibly were so rattled by the attempted assault they crashed it accidentally. It's impossible to tell.

You would be hard pressed to find a person who dislikes and distrusts the Bush administration more than I do. I just don't happen to believe the allegation that Flight 93 was shot down. I don't believe it because I see no reason to lie about it. It would have been the right thing to do.

Yup. I agree.

[JewelSong]

You would be hard pressed to find a person who dislikes and distrusts the Bush administration more than I do.

Oh, I think I could find a few people who would come pretty close.

[Jnyusa]

There are anti-conspiracy sites on the web, too, dedicated to debunking some of the wilder theories that are out there, and one of my relatives is in the Air Force and was scrambled on 9/11 so I know their perspective on what happened but they asked me not to state in public anything that was not already in the news. (Nothing that I'm not supposed to say is conspiracy worthy, btw - stuff like the identities of the AF pilots and the commercial jets involved in 'incidents' that day.)

• Flight 93 was not shot down. The AF wasn't scrambled in time.

If you recall, most were involved in exercises out west and could only be scrambled to watch jets coming in to west coast airports. One commercial jet coming in over the Pacific was ordered to be shot down and came within 10 seconds of being so, but the commercial pilot complied at the last minute with a command to change course and the kill order was cancelled. The AF pilot who was supposed to shoot them down said he could see the passenger faces gawking at him through the windows. It was the worst moment of his life.

• The theory about Flight 93 being diverted to Cleveland was an early control tower error that has simply been spread all over the internet in defiance of the truth. Things were such a mess that morning, there was a flight diverted to Cleveland and deplaned because the pilot suspected they had terrorists on board and asked to land. The control tower mistakenly reported the request as coming from Flight 93, then changed it to the correct (four number flight) a few minutes later. But the transcription of his early mistake has made the rounds and the correction printed in the Cleveland papers has been ignored. All those passengers are alive and have been contacted and the correct story has been verified.

• The descent of Flight 93 and the condition of the crash site is unusual but not unprecedented. One anti-conspiracy site gave a link to the FCC reports on one similar crash and I read them and posted about them on B77.

From what I have heard of the cockpit transcripts, there is no evidence that the passengers were able to enter the cockpit and it sounds as if pilot stupidity brought the plane down. The last sounds on the transcript (that I heard, and heard translated) were the hijackers leafing through the Flight Manual looking for instructions about something indeterminable). From the condition of the crash site, one can conclude that at that point they must have been in a nose dive already. In all probability, the plane would have crashed whether the passengers had done anything or not.

That does not diminish the heroism of the passengers, but it makes their heroism of a different sort, you see. A sort that Hollywood never bothers showing us. They were heroes for trying, even though they failed.

I don't know how the movie ends, and I'm afraid to find out. I don't trust the directors to send 'the Frodo message,' you know, that sometimes you're a hero even though technically you failed. That message does not fit what our society would like to take home from this event, namely justification for a big fat war.

Jn

p.s. these conversation are just not as much fun without Iavas arguing in the other direction. Where is he, anyway?

[vison]

From what I've read the movie ends like the thing played out in RL, that is, no one really knows what happened. I have NOT read that any movie passengers succeeded in storming the cockpit.

Whether they did or whether they didn't, it doesn't matter to me. They did what they could, and they may have prevented a worse tragedy: if that plane had hit any target on the ground, many more people would have died.

I have no trouble at all thinking that they were heroes. I hope, if the need ever arose, that I would be able to be as courageous.

On Torc, Xhen posted several lengthy rebuttals to many of the conspiracy notions. He was working for AA that day, as I recall, while not actually working as a Flight Controller. (I could be wrong about the details, but he WAS working in aviation that day.)

I remember being glued to the TV, as was almost everyone in the world with a TV, I guess. My chief recollection is of wondering where Pres. Bush was for most of the day. That, and the look on his face when the guy bent over him in the classroom to tell him what had happened. It looked like: "Oh, god, what am I supposed to do? I thought this would be an easy job like all the other ones they gave me . . ."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Spoiler Warning!
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According to the Wikipedia link that Alatar posted earlier:

The final shot in the film shows only the hands of the passengers struggling with the hijackers for control of the plane. This is a departure from the 9/11 Commission's account of events. The Commission concluded that there was no evidence that the passengers managed to enter the cockpit and that the flight recorder data showed that the hijackers remained at the controls before the plane rolled onto its back, but they must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from breaching the cockpit and overcoming them.

[vison]

:shrug:


:spoiler:











Hadn't read that. Makes no difference to me.