So Robert Zemeckis is back. For the first time in a while, he's taken a film under his wing that isn't animated. He's directing a feature film.
As the distributor's synopsis says:
"Captain Whip Whitaker is a highly skilled pilot who doesn't care about turbulence or raising his voice or adrenaline. When the transport plane he pilots flies into a massive storm during a routine flight, he coolly guides it to safety, earning the applause of 96 passengers and six crew members. The joy is premature, as the plane gradually starts to lose functions, becomes increasingly uncontrollable, and Whip decides to do something crazy - he turns it upside down, which is supposed to keep it in the air longer, and in the meantime tries to find the best possible place to land. Before a straight strip of meadow, he turns it around again and lands it on the ground at 200mph. Miraculously, 96 people survive. When Whip eventually wakes up in the hospital, he learns he's a national hero. But the adoration lasts only until the crucial question is asked: What was the captain doing before the fateful flight? That's when a new struggle begins for him. A struggle that will ultimately be harder than the one he waged with the elements and an out-of-control plane."
So the main point is that the main character, who is addicted to alcohol and drugs, has to prove to all the people who can put her in jail that she was not under the influence of substances when she was driving the flight. I don't know how much of that was made up by the writers, what percentage is actually realistic, which things in life might have happened, but it's definitely an American film that adapts a lot of things within the film to make them look like reality, but yet it's not possible in normal life.
To say that the first such unrealistic thing is actually immediately the main character. I don't believe an employer doesn't do some sort of controlling activities of their employees anymore. I don't know if they happen to be totally se*** at it in America but I think probably not. What airline would hire a pilot who is an alcoholic and does drugs. And most importantly, would the employee, the pilot, pass a background check? I guess I'll leave it in the discussion section of the article then and let some experts weigh in. Personally, I would certainly check my employees, if they are in such responsible positions, like an eye in the head.
The other interesting thing, which I don't consider to be reality, is the actual landing of the pilot with the plane and the landing maneuver. In fact, I'm very much under the impression that planes this big are not adapted to fly on their backs for that long, it seems to me a very exaggerated aerodynamic foolishness that was invented mainly to emphasize the pilot's courage and his abilities, which were adapted to alcohol. And as we all know, drunk people have more luck than sense. The other part that I didn't like about the flight itself and seems unrealistic is the actual slapping the ground with the gliding part. A large plane with about 100 people on board is probably not one of the gliders to behave the way it is shown in the movie. I'm not saying it's incapable of flying without engines, but the flight time, or even the style of flight, was indicative of it being a fabrication of the writers for the sake of the story line. The landing itself keeps popping into my head because it was the landing of a swallow, not a big plane. In general, for a plane that weighs over 50 tons, the basic laws of physics were not followed. As you can see, America always likes to invent and alter reality to better suit the audience's liking.
So such unrealistic things relegate the whole film to the Sci-Fi section. The story itself is contrived well enough, but in classic American fashion, the main character gets caught at the end of the film and does the only right thing in his entire alcoholic life. Robert Zemeckis mainly wanted to shock the public for his, another feature film in a long time. Not just with the story, but with the way things were filmed. An unrealistic landing that lacks the laws of physics, but also immediately in the first few minutes an entire naked female body (Americans are "puritans").
So how to finesse it? Shocking enough that the director has returned to feature filmmaking again. Mostly I miss an interesting story, where I didn't mind that he was making up things that aren't real in our universe. If it's supposed to be a drama, how come the entire film is interspersed with little humorous interludes from time to time that kept the entire room of film critics entertained. Thankfully, at least all the acting and technical stuff was very good. Nowhere did I find a single botch that degraded the film. Only the ones that I criticize in the body of the article.
Original release of this article February 9, 2013 – Kritiky.cz
