Flightplan

One major problem I have with movies that take place on an airplane is that many of them insist upon spending useless amounts of time on the process of going to the airport and boarding a plane. Honestly, it really is horrific enough having to go through it in real life, I have absolutely no desire to watch it as a form of “entertainment.” Aside from that, however, this movie really surprised me.

Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) has a guy’s name and is taking her daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston), back to the U.S. after tragically losing her husband in an accident. So, off they go on a ginormous new plane that Kyle herself helped design, and is therefore intimately familiar with every aspect of its construction. After a somewhat long and boring stretch of time, the flight finally takes off, so Kyle and Julia decide to get some sleep. When Kyle wakes up several hours later, however, Julia is gone. At this point she decides to waste everyone’s time by conducting an extremely drawn-out and fruitless search up and down the aisles looking for Julia, despite the fact that everyone in the audience already knows that she won’t be found until the end of the movie, if at all. Once Kyle involves the flight staff in the search, however, the movie finally picks up and turns into a surprisingly good thriller.

As the plane’s captain (Sean Bean) discusses the problem with Kyle, he and his staff start to wonder, as does the audience, whether Kyle is actually just an extremely delusional woman. Julia’s backpack is gone as is her boarding pass, the departure gate in Berlin has no record of checking her in, the passenger manifest does not list Julia as being on board, and no one sitting in the vicinity of Kyle’s seat remembers a little girl. Kyle tries to be as rationale as possible in the face of these facts as she explains to the crew with mounting panic that she definitely brought her daughter on board with her and that the only remaining conclusion is that someone has kidnapped her. Once the captain hears from a Berlin morgue director that Julia was proclaimed dead several weeks ago, however, Kyle is forced to take the situation into her own hands as everyone becomes thoroughly convinced that she is in fact insane.

One aspect of this plane thriller that made it satisfying to watch is that the logic behind the plot is, for once, reasonably sound. I didn’t leave the theater thinking about all the plot holes and flaws in the story, and I didn’t feel cheated by some kind of cheap twist at the end. The characters behave as one would expect given the situation, and the explanation at the end wasn’t outrageously absurd. The audience is allowed to view the situation from both sides of the story: the crew believes Kyle is a loonball. Well, sure—she freaks out and blames a few random passengers for stealing her daughter despite the fact that Julia is allegedly dead. Kyle believes she is the victim of some conspiracy. Well, sure—she knows she brought her daughter with her, and now she’s gone without a trace. She is at a loss to explain how or why someone would do this to her, but she has no other interpretation for the situation.

I really liked Flightplan despite its slow beginning because it was a well thought-out and executed story. It’s nice for a change to watch a movie that seems to be based on common sense, so I highly recommend that you see it.