![]() ![]() ![]() Con AirĪfter a high security prison plane is hijacked by a group of inmates, it is forced to crash land along the main strip of Las Vegas after a planned escape attempt is thwarted by the film’s hero ( Nicolas Cage). It was remade by John Moore in 2004 (only this time set in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert) as Flight of the Phoenix. Interestingly, the director’s son William – who plays one of the passengers – gets an opening credit to himself but is then immediately killed in the ensuing chaos. In one of the great sets of opening credits in Hollywood cinema, director Robert Aldrich successfully introduces all of the film’s central characters as the cargo plane in which they are travelling comes down somewhere in the Sahara after it encounters a violent sand storm.Ī quite novel and economic approach to storytelling, this scene is given a boost by Frank De Vol’s dramatic score and Aldrich’s effective use of the freeze frame. While this third instalment of the Airport franchise is, in many ways, somewhat sillier than its predecessor Airport 1975 (which itself is fairly far-fetched), it does enjoy a better cast (including Lee Grant and Christopher Lee), contains more flashy spectacle (namely the plane’s night time landing in the ocean and its eventual rescue from the shallow underwater shelf on which it precariously rests) and is more fun to sit through. It is then up to Captain Don Gallagher (a very stoic and straight-faced Jack Lemmon) to help lead his passengers to safety. Probably one of the last big budget, all-star Hollywood disaster movies to do reasonable business at the box office, Airport ‘77 follows the final journey of a privately-owned Boeing 747 that crash lands and sinks somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle after a botched hijack-robbery. A brief, but nevertheless effective, hair raising moment in what ultimately turns out to be quite a solid man-versus-nature movie. Like Cast Away and Peter Weir’s Fearless, there are no exterior shots of the accident – rather, all of the action takes place in the rapidly disintegrating cabin as the passengers and Russian crew try to buckle up before impact. When a group of oil rig employees are stranded in the freezing Alaskan outback after their mid-sized passenger plane crashes, they are pursued by a deadly pack of wolves. They revisited similar territory 12 years later in 2012’s Flight. Cast AwayĪ FedEx cargo plane carrying company employee Chuck Nolan ( Tom Hanks) plunges into the Pacific Ocean after encountering a storm while flying to Malaysia.ĭirector Robert Zemeckis and his cinematographer Don Burgess pretty much cover the whole thing using interiors, thus creating a dangerously claustrophobic environment of sheer terror. 10 Variations of Plane Crashes in Movies 10. It’s arguable this moment of destruction now lacks the novelty it enjoyed back in the late 1970s given just about all contemporary audiences from around the world are now reasonably familiar with the New York 9/11 footage of 2001, when a couple of commercial flights actually flew into two of the world’s tallest buildings. ![]() To show Dr Zonfield ( Lee Remick) that he really has destructive telekinetic powers, John Morlar ( Richard Burton) wills a passenger-filled 747 to fly into a London skyscraper. As Mark Fraser discovers, major aviation disasters in movies can happen anywhere at any time for a number of reasons. However a plane crash plays out in film, it’s almost certainly going to be memorable. Rather, aviation disaster and tragedy in the sky is staged as an event a pivotal moment that could ignite the protagonist’s journey, provide the catalyst to scaling-up an action scene, or offer a fitting denouement. ![]()
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