Flight of the Phoenix is about a small plane that crashes in the middle of a desert, and the pilots and passengers who try to save themselves by building a new plane out of the wreckage of the old one. Because the film is a remake of the 1965 movie that starred Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough and Ernest Borgnine, it is very, very tempting to say that the makers of the new film have done to the earlier film what their characters do to the original plane, and turned a sturdy old vehicle into a much creakier contraption. However, I must confess I've never seen the original film, so instead of making that particular analogy, let's try a slightly different metaphor: Flight of the Phoenix is one of those movies in which the plot mechanics are a lot rustier than the machine everybody's working on.

Dennis Quaid plays Frank Towns, Miranda Otto plays Kelly

Dennis Quaid plays Frank Towns, Miranda Otto plays Kelly

First, the set-up. An exploratory drilling rig somewhere in Mongolia has failed to turn up any oil, so the company shuts it down without warning the crew and sends in a plane to pick them all up and take them back to civilization. The plane is piloted by Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid), an airman who has earned a reputation for being the bearer of bad tidings to oil rigs everywhere, and his cockiness doesn't exactly endear him to anyone either. No sooner has the plane taken off than a storm arrives, and rather than turn back or fly around it, Frank tries to fly over it—but the plane is too heavy, it gets caught in the turbulence, and then, before you know it, the plane is hurtling down towards the dunes below.

Miraculously, no one is too badly injured, except for the few expendable non-characters who are killed almost instantly by the experience. (One person goes flying out the back of the plane, which is par for the course in such sequences, but—in what some might consider a gratuitous gesture—this film goes the extra mile and follows the victim all the way down to the ground, just so we can see his body go "thud.") Most inexplicably of all, Frank's co-pilot A.J. (Tyrese Gibson) survives intact, despite being knocked to the floor before the plane goes into a tight spin and flips upside down several times. All the other passengers have seat belts, but how does this guy make it? Was something holding him in place?

Real men have chests like Sticky Fingaz (left) and light their cigarettes with acetylene torches

Real men have chests like Sticky Fingaz (left) and light their cigarettes with acetylene torches

Once the plane has landed and a sandstorm has passed, the survivors take stock of their situation and realize that probably no one is going to find them before their supplies run out. Elliott—a mysterious passenger played by Giovanni Ribisi, who also designed all manner of flying vehicles as Dex in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow-surveys the wreckage and declares that there are enough working parts left to build an entirely new vehicle. After much bickering, the survivors agree to go ahead with Elliott's plan.

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Directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines) from a script by Scott Frank (Minority Report) and Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen), Flight of the Phoenix is riddled with moments that seem like set-ups for later scenes, but never get any kind of satisfactory payoff. For example, who is Elliott? One of the pilots asks this when he first shows up, looking for a ride even though he's not an oil worker and he's not on the list of passengers. "It's a long story," says Kelly (Miranda Otto), the geologist. Sounds intriguing. But when, some time later, she finally offers a little more detail, it turns out there's no story there at all—Elliott simply showed up at the rig one day, waited for a ride that never came, and stuck around.

If you rebuild it, they will come

If you rebuild it, they will come

Later, a band of smugglers turns up on the other side of the dune from the crash, so Ian (Hugh Laurie), a company man who knows the local dialect, heads over there with a couple of guys to negotiate and see if they can borrow some water and perhaps some other supplies as well. Just as one of the smugglers reaches toward a box, something goes wrong and a shoot-out begins that leaves most of the smugglers dead. Now, in most films, we would get to see what was inside that box—we would discover either that the box was full of weapons, thus justifying our suspicions that the smugglers had it coming to them, or that the box was full of the supplies that our heroes were looking for, thus giving the shoot-out more tragic proportions. But no, in this film, we never do find out what was in that box.

Then, in a later scene, one character kills another in cold blood—and whereas most films would "judge" the character who does the killing, possibly by having him die at some convenient moment, or by revealing something about the character that associates him with something evil, this film just sort of lets the moment go. If anything, it goes in a direction precisely opposite to the one we would expect, by revealing that the character has a background that is even less menacing or intriguing than we anticipated—which just makes it even more mind-boggling that the character would violate such a deeply-entrenched taboo without really having to deal with his decision afterwards.

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It's gonna take a lot of teamwork to get this plane off the ground again

It's gonna take a lot of teamwork to get this plane off the ground again

Perhaps I make too much of the deaths in this film. But then, so does the movie itself, in its own way; not only does it follow one poor man's fall to his doom, it also gives us an extreme slow-motion image of a man jumping backwards after he is shot in the chest at very close range, all while an exotic, entrancing tune plays on the soundtrack. The film is fascinated by death when it looks "cool," but has little interest in the morality of it.

Amidst such moments of pointless style, the film also takes time to ponder matters of faith, sort of. When one character paints the word "Phoenix" on the side of the new plane, and when it is explained that the phoenix was a mythological bird that died in flames and rose from its own ashes, Sammi (Jacob Vargas)—a chef with dreams of starting his own restaurant, who prays before his meals—says he didn't know the man painting the name was "religious," to which the man replies, "Spirituality is not religious. Religion divides people. Belief in something unites them." Sammi nods thoughtfully, as though he has just learned something. But of course, the line is utter nonsense—religion is just as much a form of belief as anything else, and like all beliefs, it both unites and divides.

The film does offer some pleasures, not least of which are the seductively framed images of the desert itself (although these days, you can never be sure whether such images are natural or computer-generated). But the squabbling between the characters grows tiresome, and the script, when it isn't dropping the ball, is tinged throughout with the same sort of self-satisfied banality that has marred much of Burns's other work (this is his first script-for-hire; all his other screenplays have been for cheap independent films that he directed and co-starred in). Suffice to say this is one flight that never quite gets off the ground.

Talk About It

Discussion starters
  1. One character says everyone needs someone to love, and if that isn't available then something to hope for, and if that isn't available then something to do. What do you make of this philosophy? Is looking for "something to do" itself a sign of hope, or a sign of resignation that there is nothing bigger to hope for?

  2. The characters have to choose between doing basically nothing and waiting for someone to find them, or doing something—building a new plane out of the wreckage of the old one—and using up their resources more quickly. What choice would you make? Why?

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  1. Does the story have any spiritual overtones? For example, do the characters make their own salvation? Do they find redemption by being forced to co-operate despite their differences with one another? Or is that reading too much into the story?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Flight of the Phoenix is rated PG-13 for some language, action and violence. There is quite a bit of gratuitous profanity, and the film dwells a little too much on some of the deaths that occur.

What Other Critics Are Saying
compiled by Jeffrey Overstreet
from Film Forum, 12/23/04

Dennis Quaid is a busy man. The star of The Rookie is back in a comedy about business ethics and fatherhood called In Good Company, which Christianity Today Movies will review in a few weeks. But this week, he's starring in a remake of an action film called Flight of the Phoenix, in which he and the other survivors of a plane crash in the Mongolian desert must put the plane back together again while trying to cope with sandstorms, attackers, and relationship turmoil.

Speaking of turmoil, religious press critics who survived the movie are just trying to cope with how bad it is.

Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies) says, "Phoenix is one of those movies in which the plot mechanics are a lot rustier than the machine everybody's working on. [It's] riddled with moments that seem like set-ups for later scenes, but never get any kind of satisfactory payoff. The film is fascinated by death when it looks 'cool,' but has little interest in the morality of it. [It] does offer some pleasures, not least of which are the seductively framed images of the desert itself. But the squabbling between the characters grows tiresome, and the script, when it isn't dropping the ball, is tinged throughout with … self-satisfied banality."

Tom Neven (Plugged In) says, "It's basically the same story [as the original]—so similar, in fact, that in places dialogue is repeated verbatim. What's different is the presence of crude, sometimes obscene language, a few sexual remarks and unnecessarily graphic violence. This new version does provide positive lessons on the value of hope, courage, selflessness and teamwork. But it toys with serious ethical issues pertaining to the value of human life without truly understanding what it's doing."

Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films) observes that this remake "mirrors the plot of the original point for point, sometimes line for line. All that's missing is little things like subtlety, nuance, characterization, and human interest. Those who have watched [the original] have no reason to watch this one; those who haven't ought not to watch this one, which would only spoil their later enjoyment of a good film with a bad one."

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Annabelle Robertson (Crosswalk) exclaims, "Wow. It's been a long time since I've seen a film this bad. The dialogue is some of the worst I've ever heard. The CGI sandstorm isn't believable, we never see anyone getting sick from the heat or constant diet of canned peaches, and no one ever gets sunburned!"

Mainstream critics are echoing these complaints.

Flight of the Phoenix
Our Rating
1½ Stars - Weak
Average Rating
 
(not rated yet)ADD YOURSHelp
Mpaa Rating
PG-13 (for some language, action and violence)
Directed By
John Moore
Run Time
1 hour 53 minutes
Cast
Dennis Quaid, Miranda Otto, Giovanni Ribisi
Theatre Release
December 17, 2004 by 20th Century Fox
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