But the touchiest question about "United 93" has been answered: Can Hollywood, notorious for fudging facts in its hunger for a multiplex-friendly film, sensitively handle its first in-depth take on the Sept. 11 tragedy?
A majority of the film's toughest audience -- Flight 93's families -- say it has and that they appreciate it. They aren't offended by the timing of the movie. In the words of many family members, Americans have become "complacent" about their lives since the Sept. 11 attacks.
"It was both excruciating and beautiful at the same time," said Los Gatos resident Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham was on the flight. Hoagland attended the Daly City screening with 60 other Flight 93 family members and friends. "I think it was faithful to what we know to have happened, and where (the filmmakers) had to improvise, the dialogue was believable."
The families are a tightly knit bunch, linked formally by a regular newsletter and a closely guarded e-mail list, but mostly by the at-all-hours phone calls that only another Flight 93 relative can truly understand. Quietly, some fear that their loved ones' midair heroism and death in tiny Shanksville, Pa., will become a forgotten footnote among the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the World Trade Center attacks.
Many family members, however, expressed ambivalent feelings about how Hollywood would shape into a commercial film what they refer to as the first moments of the post-Sept. 11 world. Two other made-for-cable TV efforts released in the past year have drawn high ratings but mixed reviews from the families.
San Rafael resident Jack Grandcolas, whose wife, Lauren, was on Flight 93, was more upset by a trade magazine advertisement touting the high ratings for the January A&E Channel movie "Flight 93" than by the cable film itself. Still, Grandcolas realizes that such popular culture treatments are inevitable; in August, Paramount Pictures is scheduled to release the $60 million film "World Trade Center," directed by Oliver Stone.
So, like other Flight 93 families, Grandcolas was apprehensive when he received a call from filmmakers about a year ago. Nevertheless, last fall he joined 20 Flight 93 family members in a hotel conference room near San Francisco Airport to hear British director Paul Greengrass explain his vision.
The director's pedigree helped. Not only has Greengrass received critical praise for his evenhanded approach to 2002's "Bloody Sunday," about a 1972 Northern Ireland shooting, but his 2004 action film, "The Bourne Supremacy," raked in $176 million at the box office.
In a three-minute trailer for "United 93," Greengrass said that after the families told him they were comfortable with making the film, he suggested that audiences "should listen to what their story is" so people don't forget the passengers' heroism.
"What impressed me is that he wanted to focus on the collective effort of all of the passengers instead of just focusing on a few," as past productions had, said Carole O'Hare, a 53-year-old Danville resident whose mother, Hilda Marcin, was on board. "And that's what we told him. We said we want everybody to be represented."
The filmmakers impressed the families with a rather un-Hollywood amount of personal touch over the next several weeks. Researchers and assistant producers conducted interviews in person with more than 100 family members and friends, flying from the Caribbean to New York to California. And actors portraying the passengers spent hours talking with families, asking about everything from what the passengers liked to wear to deeply personal anecdotes.
Some of those conversations could end up on the film's DVD. Universal has pledged to donate 10 percent of all box-office revenues from the first three days of the North American release to the Flight 93 National Memorial being planned in Pennsylvania. "But it never seemed like they were extracting information from us," Grandcolas said.
Family members said the film hews closely to the information contained in the Sept. 11 commission report. As much of what happened on the flight is unknown, Greengrass, who doubled as screenwriter, filled in the gaps. He also gave the actors permission to improvise, using what they had learned about the passengers.
Sometimes the film's real-time veracity was a bit too pointed. Grandcolas tensed during the preview screening as he watched "his wife" make a call to him from the plane. Garcia, as a matter of self-preservation, tried to watch the film as a critic. "I wanted to go outside my little box," she said.
As the lights went up in the theater, there was silence. Then a few sobs were heard. But when Greengrass appeared minutes later on a satellite hookup to hear their input, family members in attendance say only one negative comment was voiced. One unidentified woman felt the film was too violent. Garcia, among many others, praised his "courageous" filmmaking.
Near the end of their 45-minute chat, Garcia said, "Paul (Greengrass) went back to that woman and asked if she was OK now."
Many family members say they rode home silently in the rain from the theater. Emotionally drained, Grandcolas clung to the hope that the film would provoke other everyday Americans, like those on the plane, to ponder what they would do when confronted with such a situation.
"The hardest thing to do," he said, "is the right thing to do."
More than 100 family members and friends doesn't mean they spoke to all the victim families.