Before I begin, there is no doubt that the actions taken by passengers on Flight 93 averted a much greater disaster. Period! It doesn’t matter what the group or individual motives may have been. The tragic heroic result speaks for itself. I, for one, will be forever grateful to those ordinary people for finding extraordinary bravery amidst the paralysis of the deepest kind of fear.
I am troubled by the recently released movie, “Flight 93″. I have seen the trailers. I have no intention of seeing the movie. My guttural objection has nothing to do with the usual reasons: it’s too soon, it’s too graphic, it’s too commercial. My reaction was immediate and it was raw. The trailers focus on the passengers planning, talking and acting. My concern is no one, especially Hollywood, knows exactly what was said by whom for what purpose with what action. To reenact an imagined scenario stitched together by cell phone conversations to loved ones and tape recordings from the cockpit seems wrong to me when it is weaved into a real time story using real dialogue and real actions. I know this is the formula for most historical events portrayed on film, but this time it strikes me as exploitive rather than necessary.
If the film stayed out of the cabin of Flight 93, out of the unknown, I’d feel differently, for the real story is compelling enough without the sensationalism of presenting what might have happened within the plane. But it is the very drama within the cabin that the trailers draw us to. And that drama is too easy to manipulate, consciously or subconsciously, to some preconceived point of view or to influence an audience’s emotion. At best it is the creation of a writer’s educated guess and a director’s interpretation. At worst it is a producer’s self serving fantasy. Neither serves the passengers or public well.
However, the early reviews are in and apparently overwhelmingly quite favorable. Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first time I sat on the wrong side of a branch I was sawing. It’s just that I find some events way too important to unnecessarily bend and turnthis being one of them.
This article was written by Robert Crane. Author of “Still Living in the Sixties” and “The Single Adventure of Inlin Freebosh”, Robert also writes a popular blog of casual observations and polical commentary, almost always unfair and never balanced, all of which can be freely read at his website located in the outer edges of the “internets”:
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