Flying Nowhere

Rating: 5/10 (3 November 2012)

I will keep this review as terse as possible because a movie this average, it seems to me, deserves no less, but surely no more. To the film's credit, the first twenty-five minutes or so passes in nearly flawless fashion, being both breathtaking and gripping. It is well paced and well-acted, believably realistic and terrifically terrifying. And that extended intro, combined with two or maybe three other scenes, constitutes the entirety of "positives" in this film. The remaining 90 or so minutes is a cascade of unnecessary or inexplicable scenes and events, each with its own cliché and predictable and banal "moment." Perhaps the most ludicrous of these are the ones in which the film very overtly pushes—rather pathetically, I might add—not just a religious opinion, but a religious agenda. Constantly referring to the plane crash as "pre-determined" and an "act of God" (surely you can see the bigger picture here) not only comes off as extraordinarily preachy, but also undermines the entire purpose of convicting or indicting or at the very least searching for evidence of negligence on the pilots part, which is really the underlying plot for most of the movie. So in conclusion, the film is, on the whole, fragmented, broken, and rather illogical, and is connected together with a tenuous string of non sequiturs and character and plot inconsistencies, with a few very well done scenes scattered throughout. It is worth a rental at best, but if you're like me, you will want to watch only the first half-hour, because after the frightening plane crash introduction, it is the movie itself that begins to nosedive (apparently uncontrollably) and might you venture to guess who the victims of that crash are?