United 93

I saw a trailer today for United 93. The true story of the 9/11 plane that came down without being used as a weapon, thanks to the incredible bravery of the passengers.

Watching the trailer, a particular line gave me chills:

The Pilot, watching his information screen said, "Two planes just hit the World Trade Center. What happened? We just left Newark 20 minutes ago, and it was beautiful out."

That line perfectly captures my own thoughts of that day (I said almost the identical sentence to my mother when she first told me why I should turn on the news) and captures the confusion of us all on that day. Until that day, we were children. Terrorism was a word seldom used and was something that happened in other places to other people. That was the day that, while the world changed only slightly, our understanding of the world changed completely.


They also had a "making of" featurette of this movie where someone made the point that these were a random group of people, not heros, tossed together by fate.

These weren't people who chose the noble professions where people deliberately put themselves in harms way to protect the rest of us. They weren't firefighters, police officers, soldiers....they were us. And when a twist of fate asked them to be heros, they stood up and said yes.