Flight

Flight

As Lloyd Bridges states in Airplane!, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking!” a phrase that he goes onto say famously broadens, to smoking, sniffing glue and even amphetamines. After watching this, I used to believe that within them Airplane!, and the real time first world terror incident United 93, they about put an end to the Aeroplan catastrophe movie genre. But this sea of flaws and fun, directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by John Gatins, is testament to the fact that it can still be flown with some modifications of course.

In Shadows of Blues, there are characters and a plot, giving it the feel of a novel, yet most of the story is apparently true. It was one remarkable trait that was made the centerpiece of the film. The film is “inspired” by the research carried out to find a way to recover a passenger plane from what appeared to be certain doom. To accomplish this, a very risky and dramatic move is employed, and for the pilot to do so, he must be in extreme circumstances, most likely under the influence of alcohol.

There is good, upbeat, white knuckle suspense: but while the genre places the emergency closing of the oxygen masks at the very end of the movie, Zemeckis hopes to befuddle his audience by showing the oxygen mask scene not at the end but somewhere in his film. It is also an airplane air crash film. It is also somewhat solemn and rather anticlimactic film about self and moral development with hints of some religious phrases about the will to survive and fate being quite literally on one’s hand.

One love interest strand is somewhat unnecessary (and frankly the film hobbles in this regard) but its hero, Denzel Washington, snatches all the meatiest lead parts with his ovary flat out gorgeous looks and the climax is quite enjoyable, when it dawns on us that the protagonist’s life has again gone all dove tail and is headed towards what the aviation industry pretentiously calls immoderate contact with surface.

Washington plays Captain Whip Whitaker, who is not only an experienced airline pilot but also an alcoholic. The first meal we see him eating is in a hotel room. At that point, I thought John Gatins was trying to break one of the many ‘sex position’ pills by integrating sexual moments into exposition scenes.

A few of this include how two sleazy guys decide to meet somewhere because they have some business to talk about, and it’s a pole-dancing club; and then there is the case of when a sleazy guy gets up from the bed of a hotel room. Actually, it’s not quite the other way round: Whitaker has been and is still having an affair with a flight attendant, Katerina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez), and she is also a neglecter, one of those who allow Whip’s illness to flourish.

Whip remakes the last night cigarettes and alcohol again, what for him at the present moment means a terrible headache, but he makes his goodbye to this episode with a cocaine line as thick as a python before the flight. Maintaining his usual swagger, he dares to be late to board the plane (Katerina is late too!) and inhaling an oxygen mask, just the way he enjoys doing it, takes the plane for takeoff against his young co-pilot’s thoughts. A horrible experience, certainly, awaits him and the passengers, but for Whip times refuse to improve.

Thanks to some rather huge changes in the center and resolution of the storyline and other narrative gimmicks, Zemeckis creates a story that can be finished in a watchable manner. With the assistance of aria W. H. Parker in New York which might come in handy and turn out to be a pleasant trip indeed, Anna Kelly recovering from heroin abuse, his supportive friend Charlie (Bruce Greenwood), what Whip wants the most is overcome by the sequence of events. Or maybe one last trip courtesy of a subhuman, Harling, played by John Goodman is all he needs.

In one sense, Washington is reprising his complex character from his role in Training Day: a uniformed officer with a few too many vices that are best kept out of the spotlight. Washington possesses an appealing sternness to him that is magnified greatly when mixed in with any act of wrongdoing. It is not lost on Washington the extent of performance an addict can display while in need of their drug of choice.

Oddly enough, this film took my mind to an anecdote, which the veteran actress Thora Hird was known to tell about her father. He told her to never drink alcohol before stepping on stage and to make it known to everyone. He confessed that she could possibly consume alcohol quite a lot and it probably wouldn’t matter; however the point was, if she were to make even the most innocent of errors, people would gladly brand her a drunkard. Poor Whip feels remorse, but instinctively understands that he is not.

Perhaps coke and alcohol did help him get the right attitude at the controls on that horrific flight, but then again Whip understands that whatever he does is a living nightmare. Flight is one of those films that begins to disintegrate into a plot hole comedy every time you seriously think about it after watching it, but because Zemeckis is at the helm of affairs, it doesn’t ever get tiresome to watch. Perhaps not while flying though.

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