On the morning of September 11, 2001, four young Muslim men quietly leave a hotel room and arrive at Newark Airport. They make their way through security and board United Flight 93 to San Francisco, blending in with the nameless flight crew and passengers.

As the flight is delayed on the tarmac for half an hour, the FAA command center in Virginia, air traffic controllers in Newark, and military operators at the Northeast Air Defense Sector track an American Airlines flight believed to be a possible hijacking – the first one anyone’s heard of in years – as it heads toward Manhattan.

By the time those on the ground determine that a series of hijackings are taking place, United 93 is in the air. One of the terrorists constructs a fake bomb, while the others, armed with box cutters or knives, force everyone to the rear of the plane and make a stewardess open the cockpit door.

The hijackers issue no instructions, and keep their distance from the passengers, who spot the pilots being dragged out of the cockpit. Word spreads, and with free use of phones, the passengers discover the World Trade Center has been hit by other hijacked planes. A few of the passengers quickly decide to act.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, United 93 was the first major studio film to deal with the events of 9/11, but it’s a unique take. There are no characters here. No heroes or villains. The people on Flight 93 don’t even have names. Greengrass’ objective was to document the first people to emerge in a post-9/11 world, the first ones who realized what was taking place that morning, gathered themselves, and tried to do something about it.

This is something I’d never seen before: a suspense docudrama. Largely unrecognizable character actors play the passengers, while many of the air traffic officials – notably Ben Sliney of the FAA – play themselves. Greengrass is credited with writing the “script”, but had his cast repeatedly improvise the 91-minute flight in their two weeks of rehearsals and most of that is what ended up on the screen.

The first hour of the film, until Flight 93 is finally taken over, is one of the most intense sequences of sustained tension I can ever remember seeing in a movie. We know what’s about to happen, the passengers don’t, and nobody can do anything to stop it. With portable cameras and low angles, Greengrass puts us on that plane or in those control centers, where the majority of the time is spent just trying to figure out what’s happening. It feels real.

The dilemma for this film, or any other that tries to take place on 9/11, is documenting that day without turning it into popcorn or trivializing it. Greengrass’ solution is to conduct himself with journalistic integrity and honor the memory of the victims by just showing what happened, without manufactured drama, without makeup, and without any of the blows being softened.

The only type of release the movie gives is when it’s finally over, and you arrive at some intellectual understanding that, statistically, lives were saved when Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, instead of the Capitol Building. But I was hoping for a little more meaning, more context about the big picture. Without characters, conversational dialogue, or anything to really connect with, this feels more like a Discovery Channel report than a movie that I would insist anyone see.

I had little interest in what was going to happen aboard Flight 93, because, I already knew. The problem is that without any characters, there’s no one to identify with or really care about here. There’s a lot of emotion. We’re shown passengers making final calls to their loved ones, but since I didn’t even know who these people were, I wasn’t emotionally invested in what happened to them. I’d chalk this up as a bold experiment that didn’t work all that well for me.