When I saw the previews for Flightplan one word flashed through my head… Phonebooth. Another Hollywood thriller based on a single fear that is currently permeating society. As someone who was relatively close to all the sniper shootings in D.C., I thought that was pretty stupid. However, I did finally see Phonebooth sometime last semester and it was a lot better than I had expected. So, even though there was something in the back of my head insisting that Flightplan was not going to be good, I tried my best to go in with an open mind.
Jodie Foster plays Kyle, a propulsion engineer who recently lost her husband to
some kind of head trauma. A few days later it’s just her and her daughter and they’re taking his casket to Long Island for burial. With room to spare on the flight, the two decide to stretch out for a nap. When Kyle wakes up her daughter is no longer sitting next to her. The crew of the plane grudgingly agrees to help search for her, but ultimately realize that not only can they not find her daughter, but she was never actually on the plane.
Sitting across from her on this super plane (a double-decker giant, by the way, that puts most cruise ships to shame) is a man named Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) who makes the most annoyingly awkward attempts to make conversation I’ve ever encountered… Like, Ever! Also there’s a banging flight attendant played by Erika Christensen and the only real notable performance in the film from Sean
Bean as the captain.
Ok, the previews make it look much worse than it is. I mean the previews do succeed in sparking curiosity and going, “Dammit, just tell me where the hell her baby is, or if she really exists, or what.” In fact, don’t hang around the imdb message boards much unless
you want someone to spoil the ending. Now, this obvious twist and the novelty feel of the movie really make you want to hate it, but I feel like 6 years ago everybody would have jumped at the chance to see this movie. These days viewers seemed jaded at that whole
“thriller with a twist thing” and just refuse to be tricked into spending ten bucks just to find out what happens.
I will tell you that this movie sets out to do something more ambitious than you’d expect. There’s some Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick inspired shots that really make you respect the movie, but more importantly give you a very ambient, creepy
feel. At one point I saw this weird non-linear editing and all these interesting shots and I was thinking, “What the hell’s going on? This is studio-created crap, they can’t have camera angles like this.” Later, I stopped being such an asshole. It works and it’s done well. In fact, with some of the mechanical objects, ...
