Sobs at 9/11 film premiere

Much of the audience at last night's premiere of United 93 was stunned into silence, while the families of the victims broke into sobs and wails at the end of Paul Greengrass's remarkable reconstruction of the 9/11 flight whose passengers fought back.

The subdued opening to Robert de Niro's Tribeca Film Festival was a sombre affair. Many of the victims' families had expressed approval for a film that depicts the events aboard the San Francisco-bound flight 93 as faithfully as fragmentary cockpit tapes and phone messages allow, but they seemed unprepared for the gut-wrenching final scene in which the doomed jet plunges into the ground at 500 miles per hour.

United 93 is the first big-screen take on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is a starkly told story of a grim morning that needs no false dramatisation.

Despite misgivings about whether it is still too soon to depict that day in close-up cinematic detail, Greengrass's horrifically violent film has received almost universal rave reviews in the US. Greengrass retells the story with the tautness and an attention to detail that he brought to Bloody Sunday.

Even with its foregone conclusion, the director's meticulous attention to detail helps to sustain a knot of anxiety in the stomach for the duration of film.

The day's events unfold with grim realism: against the backdrop of sunny skies and warm winds, the tense purposefulness of the hijackers is pitched against the optimism of the crew and passengers about to board the plane.

Then, as one plane after another is hijacked, the bewildered authorities struggle to comprehend an assault for which there is no precedent. The mundane routines of air travel are turned into horror and disbelief.

Passengers have their throats cut, buildings are crashed into, the authority of the world's only superpower is undone - the president is nowhere to be found; the nation's fighter jets are unarmed.

The director captures the surreal quality of the situation, with no one quite able to absorb the scale of the problem. In an attempt to convey the incomprehensible to his superiors in Washington, one US military commander repeats, 'Sir, this is a real-world situation.'

Greengrass trains his dispassionate eye on the passengers of United Airlines flight 93 who, through an accident of delay, are in the air when they learn of their intended fate as participants in a kamikaze mission.