Watchmen Delayed, Flight 93 On Schedule

Hey guys, it's Donnie...and it seems to be a big day for movies about planes.

While The Watchmen remains banished to development purgatory, director Paul Greengrass has begun to move forward on another project in the meantime. He hasn't abandoned Watchmen, he's just doing something else while waiting for someone to give him the freakin money to make the good stuff. This one is currently called Flight 93 and it's about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania the morning of 9/11 because either heroic passengers subdued the terrorists or the government shot the plane out of the sky, depending on who you talk to.

Greengrass is both a highly intelligent and highly political filmmaker, and while he's not going the conspiracy theorist route, I'm sure the film will be about quite a bit more than just some brave folks who fight back against their captors. The film will run in real time, from take off to crash landing. Thus the film will only shoot for 40 days and Greengrass hopes to have it ready to go for Cannes in 2006. This announcement closely follows the recent news that Oliver Stone is moving forward on his 9/11 project about rescue workers trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Towers. I like both of these projects because they seem to be tackling the events of that morning from two very distinct viewpoints which audiences will probably be able to indentify with while not feeling like they necessarily have to relive the whole ordeal in order to get it, Greengrass's project obviously moreso because no one knows exactly what happened on board that flight.

While the title, Flight 93, is obviously way more appropriate for this project than, say Pacific Air Flight 191, it still seems a little cold, a little impersonal to me. Besides, whenever I hear a title that's simply an flight number, I immediately think of Passenger 57. Gah....