Past tense

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As I’m sure you are aware, United Airlines’ Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 — the one that did not reach its target. I shall ignore the internet-based argument over what happened to United 93 in its final minutes (did it crash into the ground or explode in the air?) since this film is a telling rather than an investigation. We may ask questions when we emerge from the cinema, but no one is asking questions in the film.

In fact, names you will not hear mentioned during the course of the film include Osama bin Laden, al-Qa’eda, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, Afghanistan. No one but the hijackers has any idea what’s going on; the attack, quite literally, falls out of the sky. ‘A hijacking?’ queries someone at the Federal Aviation Administration, when the first plane stops ‘squawking’ to air-traffic control. ‘We haven’t had one of those for 40 years!’ The military, once alerted to the situation, shouts repeatedly, ‘We have a real world situation!’ It seems no one could quite believe what they were hearing.