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Tonight, we went to catch Flightplan. It's an okay thriller, so long as you don't think too hard about the plot. Or the actual details.
Jodi Foster plays a woman who's husband has fallen to his death in Berlin. She and her daughter are flying the body home to Long Island NY on a trans-Atlantic flight. Both mom and daughter fall asleep, then Ms. Foster awakens after three hours. The daughter is missing.
From there, the movie follows Foster as she tries to find her daughter without going so completely over the dead end that she is immobilized for the duration of the flight. Foster has to try to win over skeptical members of the flight crew, the increasingly on edge passengers (wouldn't you be a wee bit upset if someone started to act out more and more each time while encased in a tube some thirty thousand feet above the ocean?) all while keeping her wits about her. Foster is up to the challenge and mostly pulls it off.
The cinematography was interesting, if not a touch overwrought. The abundance of reflected imagery made it readily apparent that things are not what they seem, but I found that to be a bit much after a while.
Watch time 52 minutes. If you've seen the film and/or want some spoilers, check out the extended comments.
For one thing, I found it to be quite incredulous that the kidnappers/blackmailers would just happen to find someone with a small child than can be used for leverage and has intimate knowledge of the construction of a very large commercial airliner. Even with Ms. Foster's stated professional (she works on jetliner engines as an engineer/designer), given the size and complexity of a commercial jetcraft, the odds that a single specialist would be able to have all the intricate details of the plane in their head, on demand, with perfect instant recall is rather unlikely.
Moving on to a more political topic, a while back, the union for flight attendents has lodged a protest regarding this film, saying that having one of the bad guys (or, in this case, a bad girl) be a flight attendent is in poor taste.
"Should there be another 9/11, it would be critical for the cabin crew to have the support of their passengers, not the distrust that this movie may engender," said Tommie Hutto-Blake, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants. "Our fellow crew members who perished in the line of duty deserve more respect."
The press release goes on to call for a boycott of the film.
What I don't understand here is why they would be up in arms about this movie. One person (1!) is a member of the evil plot, and the attendent in quesetion pulls out before the schema can come all the way to fruition. Not the other twenty some members of the crew. Yes, some of the members of the crew are depicted as being less than 100% dedicated towards serving the crew at all times, but is this any surprise to anyone that maybe someone might slack off from time to time? And, in any case, when the chips are down (like when Ms. Foster's character deploys the air masks), all the attendents leap to help the passengers.
If there was going to be any group offended by their respresentation, it would be the air marshalls. It's pretty clear in this film that the air marshall is the one behind everything, killing the husband, kidnapping the daughter and manipulating the crew (particularly the captain).
I'm not all that worried about this -- for better or worse, there will always be some percentage of bad apples in any group of people. I'm sure that most, if not all of both air marshalls and flight attendents are consciencious, forthright people trying to do their level best. After all, this is just a movie.
And, if you really want to get into a movie that makes flight attendents look bad, check out Passenger 57.
Posted by Casper at October 9, 2005 09:02 PM