Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

In a word, fantastic!

Top-notch, four-star thriller.

It does exactly what I described above. Sure, there are a few things that don't make perfect sense, but they don't reach that point of being insulting and the movie carries you along so effectively that you don't notice any problems at all and you are just thoroughly entertained for the entire running time.

If you aren't already familiar with the premise, you should just stop reading now and go see the movie. I'm not going to give any spoilers that aren't available in the trailer, but frankly, if you haven't seen the trailer, don't watch it, don't read the rest of this review, just go see it.

One of the downsides of trailers and screenings and such is that in can undercut the effectiveness of some story-telling techniques. Ultimately, the trailer doesn't "give everything away" because the story doesn't depend on secrecy, but the build in the early scenes of the movie is so effective and I can only imagine how cool it would have been to go in without knowing the broad strokes of what was going to happen.

So I'm going to now proceed with the review as though everyone has at least seen the trailer. As I mentioned before, the initial build is extremely effective. We begin with Lisa, who works as a hotel manager at a luxury resort. She's played by Rachel McAdams, who I'm told is very good in Wedding Crashers, but I have not seen before. Simply put, she's very good. Anyway, Lisa is young for such an important position, but she's got a cool head, and we see her handling problems with a cool head and obvious competance. (This section also introduces a secondary character who pops up from time to time to offer the critical, but often overlooked, comic relief.)

I just deleted a very long description of what happens in the opening scenes. I had wanted to describe what made the build so effective, but I don't want to just tell you what happens when you could just go see the movie and find out for yourself. The one-sentence version is that the way Cillian Murphy's character goes from charming, attractive and self-deprecating to cold, sinister and threatening is very very good. You might remember him as the Scarecrow from Batman Begins, and he demonstrates a very wide range in this film. He's got a future ahead of him too.

So, I'll avoid really spending any more time just telling you what happens. Suffice it to say that the movie functions exactly as a thriller should, delivering suspense, scares and some very satisfying excitement.

One of the things that I really liked about it is that, even if you could potentially find some fault with the plot itself, the way the main character responds is fantastic. She's not a superhero, she's just a normal person, and yet, she's a smart normal person. She does all the right things and she tries everything. So often in these movies you want to yell at the protagonist for being so stupid. In this one, just before you're about to yell at her to do something, she actually does it!

So I won't say any more about it except that it's very good and I recommend it highly.

Flightplan, I'm sorry to say, is just average. Or rather, it averages out to be average.

Jodie Foster is a mother who is on a long international flight with her daughter. She takes a nap on the plane, but when she wakes up her daugher is missing. But how could she disappear on a plane? And why doesn't anyone else remember her even getting on board in the first place?

The reviews I'd read seemed to suggest that the movie is polarizing. Some reviews calling it "ingenious and airtight" another calling it "diabolically retarded". So I was actually rather surprised to find myself almost exactly in the middle. It's an extremely well-made and well-acted movie with a pretty crappy script.

Now, I was predisposed to like this movie. I really like Jodie Foster, and even though I knew that the movie would have a big "TWIST"TM, that would likely be less than entirely plausible, I figured that I was prepared to suspend a great deal of disbelief if the rest of the movie made it worth my time.

I was almost completely right, except that the rest of the movie wasn't quite good enough to support the ridiculously implausible script. I really wanted it to be, but it just wasn't. The problem essentially, without going into spoilerish detail, is that when the mystery is "answered" the answer basically spits in the figurative face of Occam's Razor. What happens is so overly complicated that you really wonder why anyone would bother when they could surely accomplish the same objectives in a much simpler way and without relying so much on coincidence.

Another part of the problem I think is that they don't have sufficient grounding in reality. We can buy extraordinary weird and implausible things much easier if the rest of the story is convincing enough. But the problem here is that Jodie Foster isn't just a normal woman. She designs planes, including the one it takes place on. It isn't just a normal plane, it's some super-duper double-decker plane with spiral staircases and a lounge. There just isn't enough connection to normality for us to buy the extraordinary.

But the acting is good, very good even, and the movie actually moves along pretty nicely up until the twist. But that's not enough, because a build-up like this can't support itself without the pay-off. It's like building a lean-to. You can make it water-tight and wind resistant and insultated and perfect, but without something to lean it on, it'll just lie there on the ground.

The premise and content of this movie certainly bring to mind two other films: The Forgotten, and Panic Room. In many ways, this allows a helpful comparison.

It's better than The Forgotten, but not as good as Panic Room.