The Discovery Channel aired (as of 9/2005) a film called The Flight That Fought Back (apparently with Tom Brokaw).
This film was aired on the evening of 9/11/2005. Info: 2005, The Discovery Channel, dir. Bruce Goodison, UK/USA, 90 min, PG-13, with interviews by Tom Brokaw. The film is set up as a docudrama, with actors for the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 and hijackers, and with still photos of the actual people, with the real spouses, siblings, children, and parents of the passengers. The film begins with a provocative manner, with a shot of the CBS Morning News that day, whereupon we shift to a scene in a hotel room, over the washbasin, where a man shaves his forearms and presumably his underarms and chest. This was reported in the media as part of the radical Islam 'purification' ritual before a suicide mission. Soon the film shifts to interviews with family members, including the mother of Mark Bingham. Mark is described as an unstereotyped gay man who played rugby. Several other major passengers are presented, including one with a son at West Point. Soon the film goes into the narrative of the day's tragic events, with passengers gradually getting the word that this is no ordinary hikacking. Mark Bingham's mother leaves a blunt voice mail on Mark's cell phone that this is a suicide mission, intending to use the plane as a missile, and that they might as well counterattack against the hijackers. The later part of the film shows the attempts to breach the cockpit with the snack cart. At one point, Todd Beamer really says, "Let's roll!" There is controversy over whether the Air Force would have shot them down anyway, but at the time of the crash in Shanksville, Pa the nearest jet was 150 miles away, and permission to shoot down a civilian jet had not yet been granted.
A&E presented the Fox TV movie Flight 93, directed by Peter Markle, on Jan. 30, 2006. According to a Yahoo! Video, some families of victims now support the movie.
The film (100 min, sug PG-13) starts like the previous one, with a chilling scene of the terrorists in the motel, shaving their faces, then one of them shaving his chest after spreading shaving cream on it, almost as if his chest were an extension of his face and beard. All that body shaving is rumored to be specified in various Islamic rituals, but I don�t think the Koran says anything like that (and so far, no film about the Hajj has mentioned it). This film is more dramatic than the previous one. The hijackers put on red bandanas just before they take over the plane. There is a little more drama with the families receiving the phone calls. The turnaround of the plane in northern Ohio is shown as nearly causing it to crash, and there are some witness accounts that say it actual turned around a little further west, about six miles NW of the town of Kipton (near Oberlin) Ohio, and nearly crashed there. "Let's roll" is said softly, but the passengers roll the car as a battering ram or ramrod to destroy the cockpit door. Had they been able to kill the hijackers and control the plane, there is a reasonable chance that a few of the passengers would have been able to control it and get back to Air Traffic control and land it around Johnstown or perhaps a little farther east where it is flatter, like Lancaster. The crash was in old stripmine country, three miles from Shanksville, west of Allegheny Mountain on the Pa. turnpike, and not too far from the famous UFO incident near Kecksberg. The fighter jets that might have shot the plane down are shown. Had the plane reached the Capitol (or the White House), everyone would have long since been evacuated from any major building, so even given the enormous destruction, there might have been few deaths on the ground.
This should not be confused with the film United 93 directed by Paul Greengrass, for Universal (with French production), a much larger film for theaters (2006). Cheyenne Jackson plays gay rugby player Mark Bingham, and David Allan Basche plays Todd Beamer. It strikes me that the passengers who rushed the cabin to crash the plain forfeited any chance for a gradual afterlife as we now understand the death process (because the brain has to stay intact for a while). This was ultimate sacrifice, as otherwise we might have a rebuilt Capitol now.
I have visited the Memorial site in PA three times, most recently in Sept. 2021.