Movie Review - Flight

Friday night and the last free Friday night for the term.  The calendar is full.  mostly P1.

Marcus, Sarah and Dan having a sleepover at Bryace & Steven's.
Chris could look after himself for dinner.

A voucher for the "Blue Room" Cenema had appeared at my party (Thankyou).  This is a nice venue.  The seating is in pairs and you share a little table.  Food and drink is deleivered during the  movie.  Megan and I had excellent pizza.

Being my birthday, I chose the movie flight.  Billed as an action drama as I recall.

Well it turned out to be a little like chocolate mud cake.  Looks good and all that chocolate raise your expectations but when you get into it it just does not deliver.  Somewhat dry and leaving you with a feeling that it could have been a lot better.

Spoiler alert - Don't click the read more link!

The trailer shows the hero captain whittaker performing some amazing flying to save a stricken plane and suggests that in the ensuing investigaton that suspicions begin to be raised and perhaps all is not as it should be.  Is it his past, is there a conspiracy to frame him to cover for a dodgy plane.....

The movie opens with him and a woman who turns out to be a flight attendant having an affair, in that scene we discover he has an ex wife and they are drinking alcohol and snorting cocane.  So we already know he is a bit of a dodgy low life character even though when in his pilots uniform the accomanying camera angles and music portray him as powerful, cool and larger than life.

The plane takes off and the weather is very very bad and our hero confidently pushes the plane past its limits as interpreted by the co pilot who objects to the speed but then the plane emerges from the storm into clear sky.  Next we see the captain addressing the passengers from the galley while unseen by the passengers he is decanting vodka into a large bottle of orange juice.  He then goes to sleep in the cockpit while the copilot flys the plane.

He is awoken by a large bang and the plane is in a dive.  In the exciting action sequence, he and the copilot fight with the plane switching to manual control.  In all of this he is calm cool and collected with just a bit of urgency in his voice.  He comands the cockpit, rolls the plane so it is upside down.  This somehow sort of fixes the problem and then they roll it back over and crash land.  Later we discover with the loss of only 6 "souls".

From this point on the movie bogs down.  We have had the action.  Now we get the drama.

I suspect the script was written by a die hard from AA or the temperance league.  There are some odd references to God and everyone refers to passengers as "souls".  I could imagine one person doing this but surely most people would refer to them as passengers or people or clients. 

The rest of the movie basically has him swinging between no drink - throwing it all out and later going to a grog shop and buying new supplies, drinking them and passing out.  Along the way a new found friend who is an ex druggie leaves because she fears that around him, she will use again.  Other friend try to keep him sober for the FAA hearings but of course he always finds a way to get grog and at the end even his friends are supplying him with cocaine which apparantly helps a drunk person appear sober.  So I might have learned something.

There was a hint of a conspiracy when the owner of the airline implied that the drunk pilot was a convienient scapegoat for the lack of maintenance on the plane but because we already knew the pilot was a low life and because it was this far through in the movie and even though the pilots union seemed in that scene to side with the owner, it just reverted back to the pilots uni8on and lawyer working dilengently to defent the drunken pilot.  A task which his drinking did not make easy.

It could have been a much better move. It needed suspence.  The conspiracy aspect could have come out first and the drinking and drugs could have been done maybe with flashbacks so we did not see it so clearly.

But in the end I suspect they set out to make a movie to show us just how alcoholics will lie even to their friends and how their friends will often compensate and cover for them.  The only real negative was he saved the plane.  If he had not been drunk, would he have been brazen enough to do the roll that somehow unjammed the steering???