A tight little thriller with a supernatural twist. These are some of my favorite types of movies if they are done well, but that means the supernatural element should be cool and the explanation for it all needs to be really cool. So how did this one do?
The story: a girl who has just gotten her pilots liscence takes her friends up in a plane when something goes wrong and the plane won't stop climbing and become lost in a large cloud formation where they are attacked by a strange creature.
Was it good?
Almost. I mean, for the first hour it was good...almost really good...but then it fell apart.
So what worked? The basic idea of these kids being caught on this plane that has this malfunction forcing it to keep climbing was cool and then they start piling on the problems -- the instruments are malfunctioning, they can't reach anyone on the radio, they fly into a giant storm cloud...and then they start heaing/seeing a strange creature.
Hell yes! All that worked and I thought this was going to be my sleeper movie of the year. And then...
Well, first, things started to get TOO outrageous. The supernatural creature is this giant monster that just felt impossible. It isn't like that Twilight Zone episode where it's this gremlin -- this is a giant monster. In some ways it was cool, but it was definitely too much. But ti still might have been okay...until they explained it all.
*** SPOILERS ***
So apparently, all this is because this kid is reading a comic book and he gets scared on planes and has this supernaturla power that whatever he sees when he gets scared manifests in real life. Not only that, but it turns out it has happened before on the plane crash that killed the girl's mother. But I guess he only gets scared while flying because it apparently has never happened any other time. Oh, and then it turns out he can control it sort of and even cause them to travel in time somehow.
Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense. It's one of those WTF endings that I assume was inspired by bad episodes of LOST or something, because it just becomes a giant steaming pile. If they had come up with something better than psychic comic book scaredy cat guy (like just making them real monsters or aliens or something) then it could have been really cool. It could have been this year's DESCENT (the first one, not the sequel). But no, they flubbed the ending and the whole movie fell apart. I went from ready to e-mail my friends and family to, well, writing this review.
It's a shame because it was close to being good. Really good. The other thing they needed to fix was the characters. Compare this story to THE DESCENT -- there they have likable characters and some real emotional stakes (one girl lost her husband and is trying to become sane, the others lost their group and are trying to get back together), and here there are no emotional stakes. It almost forces the filmmakers to come up with that BS ending because there's no other way to get any sort of emotion to the ending at all. Which isn't an excuse for the ending -- there's NO excuse for that ending -- but it shows what happens when you write yourself into a corner.
**** AVOID ***
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