You've brought up a very important point.
We don't know what happened beyond brief phone calls and cockpit voice recorders. However, it is the director's job to analyze the event to the best of his ability and create his own personal interpretation. This is not a documentary, this is a fictionalized image of what Greengrass believes happened on board that plane. Does he know for sure that someone raised the fake bomb above his head in triumph? No. Is it a reasonable reaction? Certainly. This is a piece of art, in the end. However, it is a sane and intelligent look into the events on board the plane. The fact that we feel it is an accurate portrayal speaks highly of the filmmaker himself, whom I now consider a master storyteller.
We are not looking for factual truth in this film, but emotional truth, which Greengrass has found. One reviewer astutely put it this way:
"In his neo-factualist films, Greengrass finds out as much as he can about the event he’s depicting and recreates as much of it as possible and then, having carefully built this structure of verisimilitude, gives his actors room to find their own reality for their characters. In the end the scenes in Bloody Sunday or United 93 may not be true in the very strictest sense of the word – those lines were not spoken, that exact action was not taken – but they are very true in the deeper, emotional sense of the word. Yes, the audience says, that was how it must have been.
It’s a world between documentary and narrative, and some people have gotten lost on their way there. I have had arguments with other journalists about the film where they’ll take the position of “No one could know what happened on that plane!” Which is true, but doesn’t really change the inherent emotional truth of what Greengrass is showing."
I have no doubt I'll be arguing with others about the film where they'll take the position of "No one could know what happened on that plane!".
Which is true to a point, -- if the unrecorded cell phone conversations are ignored as second person hearsay.
The danger is in letting emotional judgments cloud the inherent truth of what Greengrass has shown.
- I think it's very well established that the passengers stopped the hijacking of flight 93, "emotional truth" notwithstanding.
We don't know what happened beyond brief phone calls and cockpit voice recorders. However, it is the director's job to analyze the event to the best of his ability and create his own personal interpretation.
I was very impressed with the director's decision to have the hijacker flying the plane begin flying erratically as his final defense to keep the passengers out of the cockpit. I had not thought of it before, but that would have been the rational move on his part. A lesser film would have missed that.
Any thoughts on Greengrass' decision to have the hijackers speak almost no English? It intensifies the us/them dichotomy of the film. But I wonder whether this is based on his research of the hijackers or a directorial decision. The hijackers do not even know enough English to shout "sit down" at people.