Beginning on a dark and dreary night, the voice of Mark Hamill can be heard quoting a line attributed to Edmund Burke I believe. This is perhaps the most promising part of the film, implying a dark and sinister plot. From there on in, it's downhill I'm afraid.
We begin on the last shift of Mark Hamill's air traffic controller, in a British airport less busy than Blackpool Airport at 2 am. Seriously, the extras budget for this film seemed none existent.
This is also true on the plane where an extremely small band of passengers for a 747 board a flight to New York - the flight crew almost outnumber them.
One gets the sense watching these characters interact that they were all cast individually, with absolutely no chemistry between the characters whatsoever. Even the extremely rapid sex scene, with its obligatory breast shot, is unbelievable for that point.
When one passenger wakes and the annoying guy who was sitting next to him is missing, instead of breathing a sigh of relief or assuming the guy has gone the toilet, this character entirely over-reacts to his absence. And I'm afraid that this pattern continues throughout the film with each reaction to somebody missing coming far too quickly, and the action being ramped up in a forced manner.
The notion that the plane, which can't be shot down because it has entered South American airspace, can be communicated with from the UK was one of the many unbelievable facts that this film asks us to swallow.
Mid-way it is revealed that the disappearances are all down to an attempted robbery but, by the time we've come to accept that idea, they throw another twist in involving a relic that apparently possesses the spirit of a God and has been killing off the people that our robbers didn't.
Sigh...
The script is overloaded with plot which I suspect may have something to do with how lacking it is in character development. I felt quite sorry for Mark Hamill as he played his role quite sincerely on the ground, possibly unaware of the garbage that was happening on the plane. I only hope he was paid well.
It felt like someone, one week, was given access to a flight simulator and dragged whatever cast they could get together and wrote an awful script, then filmed it.
Like I said in my title: With a better script and a better cast, this could have been a good film. Alas, it wasn't and I'm being generous giving it a 4 out of 10.
We begin on the last shift of Mark Hamill's air traffic controller, in a British airport less busy than Blackpool Airport at 2 am. Seriously, the extras budget for this film seemed none existent.
This is also true on the plane where an extremely small band of passengers for a 747 board a flight to New York - the flight crew almost outnumber them.
One gets the sense watching these characters interact that they were all cast individually, with absolutely no chemistry between the characters whatsoever. Even the extremely rapid sex scene, with its obligatory breast shot, is unbelievable for that point.
When one passenger wakes and the annoying guy who was sitting next to him is missing, instead of breathing a sigh of relief or assuming the guy has gone the toilet, this character entirely over-reacts to his absence. And I'm afraid that this pattern continues throughout the film with each reaction to somebody missing coming far too quickly, and the action being ramped up in a forced manner.
The notion that the plane, which can't be shot down because it has entered South American airspace, can be communicated with from the UK was one of the many unbelievable facts that this film asks us to swallow.
Mid-way it is revealed that the disappearances are all down to an attempted robbery but, by the time we've come to accept that idea, they throw another twist in involving a relic that apparently possesses the spirit of a God and has been killing off the people that our robbers didn't.
Sigh...
The script is overloaded with plot which I suspect may have something to do with how lacking it is in character development. I felt quite sorry for Mark Hamill as he played his role quite sincerely on the ground, possibly unaware of the garbage that was happening on the plane. I only hope he was paid well.
It felt like someone, one week, was given access to a flight simulator and dragged whatever cast they could get together and wrote an awful script, then filmed it.
Like I said in my title: With a better script and a better cast, this could have been a good film. Alas, it wasn't and I'm being generous giving it a 4 out of 10.