NEW YORK – The first few hours of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have been imagined and replayed countless ways in the minds of many, but for the first time, a movie of that nightmare premiered on the big screen.
“United 93,” the first feature film to dramatize the Sept. 11 story, opened the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday in front of a somber audience that included victims’ relatives.
“The vision is something we see in our heads every day,” said Jan Snyder, whose daughter Christine was on the flight. “It’s time for this. The public needs to know, they need to remember and know what the families have gone through.”
“Only 40 people truly know what happened that day and I thought he went to painstaking grounds to make it feel that all 40 of them were a part of it,” said Ken Nacke, whose brother Louis was killed.
Nacke said he found himself “rooting for them, for a different outcome.”
The 90-minute movie takes place in real time and portrays the story of the flight that left Newark, N.J., and crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers rallied against their hijackers and tried to recapture control of the jet. Officials believe Flight 93, carrying 40 passengers and crew plus the four hijackers, was headed for the White House or the Capitol.
At Tuesday’s premiere, the screen went dark after the stomach-turning sequence showing the plane’s nosedive. The theater was silent except for the gut-wrenching sobs and wails from where the relatives were seated together.
Moviegoers absorbed and shared their pain. Throughout the screening, they wept, drew sharp breaths, gasped and covered their faces with their hands. They shifted in their seats, sometimes to look back at the family section.
“You saw moviemaking and real life come together,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a consultant from Manhattan who attended the premiere. “It fills in the mystery of what happened.”
In the film, the Flight 93 story is juxtaposed with that of the air traffic controllers, who watched with disbelief as four planes were seized and crashed by 19 terrorists. American Airlines Flight 11 slammed first into the north tower of the World Trade Center, United Airlines 175 hit the south tower and United 77 went down at the Pentagon.
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