DVD Review: Flight 93

Director: Peter Markle (Saving Jessica Lynch, Faith of My Fathers)
Producer: David Gerber
Starring Jeffrey Nordling, Ty Olsson, Brennan Elliot, Colin Glazer and Kendall Cross


You could be forgiven for bracing yourself for expecting a predictable and cheesy re-enactment of an enormous tragedy with the new Metrodome release Flight 93 – and its making was controversial in the States. But in actual fact you never get the feel with the film that the producers were in it for the bucks.

Flight 93 is a made-for-television- movie that premiered on the US channel A & E in January 2006 and is out on DVD for the first time in the UK since the end of June. It portrays the incidents that unfolded on board the fourth airplane hijacked on Sept 11 during which time the passengers and crew overran their hijackers before the plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

The action on board the plane is based on details given by passengers to their relatives over the phone, the flight’s black box recordings, and at some points just thoughtful guess work and is interspersed with tense scenes in the bureaucratic bodies and flight control rooms that keep the film flowing forward.

One of the greatest strengths of the movie is the convincing performances of the unknown actors. The performances in the film are not overacted, meaning that the highly emotional interchanges made between those on the plane and their relatives on the ground via phone are touching rather than over-sentimentalised.

Nor are the heroes lost in overblown and unrealistic heroics. Rather they are portrayed much how must have been: as ordinary “everyday” people who didn’t want to die but who gave their lives to save the lives of others.

Although you can never quite escape the TV-movie quality of the film, it is nonetheless well made and thought-provoking; it does not rely on any major special effects and therefore allows the people to come through, giving the audience a real sense of what it was like to be the victim in the plane and also the relative on the ground.

And despite the foregone conclusion of the film, the inevitable end of the passengers and crew that we know so well, Flight 93 maintains its suspense throughout.

The film is not “groundbreaking” as some have described it, but it is “respectful” as others have said of it. It, surprisingly, does not over-sensationalise or –emotionalise the event and although it does have an unmistakably American made-for-TV gloss to it, it remains a very human drama and is definitely one of the best TV movies ever made.


Flight 93 is out on DVD now by Metrodome, priced £12.99, Cert 15.