Examines the inner battle of an airline pilot and his alcohol and drug dependency.

Rating: Null/10 (14 February 2013)

I suppose the first question many of us might have after seeing this movie, "I wonder if one of my flights ever had a drunken Captain in charge?"
We have known for a long time that Denzel Washington is one of our finer actors, but many of his roles don't really require him to stretch very much. This one does, and it is no surprise that he has been nominated for "Best Actor" in this role.
He is Whip Whitaker , former military pilot and now for some years a very good and very well-respected airline pilot. On this day he is flying from Florida to Atlanta, a fairly short flight leaving at 9AM, he didn't really sleep the night before, having his own personal booze and sex party with one of the flight attendants. He nearly oversleeps but gives himself a "kick" by doing two lines of cocaine.
Now that's not a very good vision of how airline pilots prepare for work, but we DO hear periodically that a drunken pilot is removed from the cockpit, fortunately right before the flight leaves.
But Whip is an artist at the controls, he pulls a non-approved maneuver right after takeoff to fly through a seam in the severe weather, then hands the controls to his young co-pilot, one he has never flown with before, and takes a nap. Only to be abruptly awakened when a loud thump is heard and they lose the ability to control the plane.
As has been widely publicized via trailers for the film, the only way Whip could hope to salvage the plane was to invert it, so the "dive" would turn into a "climb" and achieve "level" via throttle control. The crash landing in a pasture outside Atlanta only resulted in 6 deaths among the 102 on board. Whip was a hero.
All this transpires during the first few minutes of the movie, which runs just over 2 hours. The flight and crash-land are only there to set up the real story, whether Whip can ever admit he has a problem with alcohol and drugs, and whether he can ever pull himself out of it. There was no question about the cause, the investigation pointed to improper maintenance, failure to replace a control-surface screw in a timely manner, and its failure in flight caused the problem. Nine other pilots were asked to try to pull the same airplane rescue in simulators, none of them could. Whip really was a hero, had any other pilot been in charge all 102 likely would have died.
But there was still that matter of alcohol and drugs found in a sample of Whip's blood, and the several empty small bottles of vodka that were unexplained.
The movie, by Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Romancing the Stone, Cast Away, and many others) is very well structured and acting is top-notch. A very worthwhile film about drug and alcohol demons and how difficult they are to slay.
SPOILERS: With the help of a good lawyer and some testing irregularities, Whip appeared ready to escape legal consequences. All the had to do is testify that he suspected his flight attendant girlfriend, who died in the crash, has consumed the alcohol. He would be free. But his conscience finally kicked in, he was tired of lying his way through life, told the truth, and as the movie ends he is in prison running an AA group, and in a visit seems perhaps on the way to a better relationship with his teenage son.