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SPRING FORWARD: The passengers of United 93 rush the cockpit.

In a sense, this is a movie no one should ever have to see, because the events depicted in it ought not to have happened. As the film documents with awful exactitude, Flight 93 left Newark airport two minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, and the pilots were warned to "beware cockpit intrusion" minutes before the plane was hijacked. But if a theme emerges from the tangled mess of overlapping accounts and jittery camera moves, it's that miscommunication, not rapid response, was the order of the day. Late in the film, as the plane's passengers piece together the details of what's happening on the ground, Barry Ackroyd's camera tracks down the plane's center aisle as word passes from one person to the next, like a macabre game of whisper down the lane.

With only their cell phones to link them to earth, Flight 93's passengers are necessarily in the dark. But their counterparts on the ground don't fare much better. While its re-creation of onboard events is necessarily speculative, United 93's record of the chaos that swept through the country's air defense system is chiseled in stone, an unsettling memorial to the country's complacency. The glass-walled, flat-screened spaces of the FAA command center in Herndon, Va., and the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, N.Y., are so familiar from spy thrillers and 24 as to be practically banal, except that instead of super-soldiers springing instantly to action, we're privy to unanswered phone calls and bureaucratic tie-ups that grow increasingly grueling as the clock keeps ticking. Although the story dictates a certain jingoism—the film originally ended with the now-scrubbed caption, "America's war on terror had begun"—the unanswered requests for guidance from above form a damning refrain. As the movie points out in its closing text, authority to shoot down hijacked planes was not granted until 10:18 a.m.—14 minutes after Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field. In Greengrass' telling, the passengers of Flight 93 organize themselves to fight back not out of patriotism or valor, but quite simply because they realize that no one else will.

The crash, of course, is United 93's raison d'etre, a moment the movie tries to mythologize and demystify at the same time. Plugging evidentiary gaps with improvisation, Greengrass eschews pat characterization for docudramatic urgency. Apart from the stenciled surnames on the flight attendants' uniforms, none of the plane's passengers is identified by name, their conversations limited to overheard scraps. Even Todd Beamer's famous (and probably apocryphal) cry of "Let's roll" is swallowed up in a torrent of words, "Come on, let's roll, let's go already." The movie fudges facts at the critical juncture, suggesting that Flight 93's passengers breached the cockpit with a meal-cart battering ram (contradicting data from the plane's black box), but the image of open-door apotheosis must have been too much to resist, just as the notion that the passengers merely goaded their hijackers into premature suicide must have been unbearable. Other conjectures are more persuasive, or at least less questionable, such as the hijackers' intended target, established by a photo of the U.S. Capitol taped to the pilot's yoke.

Greengrass, a British documentarian whose previous features include Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Supremacy, sticks to his faux-doc style with a rigor that would be deadly to a different film. Few of the characters are individualized beyond their basic functions; although every one of Flight 93's 37 passengers (including the four hijackers) and seven crew members are listed in the credits, you'd have to know, for example, that Jeremy Glick was proficient in karate, or that Mark Bingham was an avid rugby player, to match a face to a name. But despite the fact that several actors reportedly got in touch with the families of the characters they portray, or that each of Flight 93's victims is movingly eulogized in the movie's press notes, United 93 isn't really their story, because it can't be. In fact, since the movie doesn't unequivocally give itself over to the onboard events until the last 20 minutes or so, it's possible that the passengers don't even clock the majority of the film's screen time. Rather than any of the victims or terrorists, the central character in United 93 is Ben Sliney, who started his job as the FAA's top controller on the morning of Sept. 11. Sliney, who, along with several other Herndon and NEADS personnel, plays himself, is the movie's sounding board for misinformation, incredulously reacting as planes vanish from the radar and lines of communication are hopelessly snarled. Staring at a map of the country thick with green dots, each representing a plane in flight, Sliney's bafflement is palpable, as is the sense that, at that moment, the country is twisting in the wind. Although George W. Bush co-opted Beamer's rallying cry as a sign of his own decisiveness, United 93 leaves the lingering sense that we're still flying blind.

United 93

Written and directed by Paul Greengrass A Universal release Opens Friday at area theaters