Air Crew

The film comes in two halves. The first follows three Soviet pilots on the ground: marriages, separations, career calculations, loneliness. In the second they end up on the same aircraft, and an evacuation flight out of a small town in the mountains during an earthquake turns into a catastrophe. They have to bring a badly damaged plane down. Aleksandr Mitta's 1980 production is generally counted as the first big Soviet disaster film and drew enormous audiences. The effects were ambitious for their day, but the interesting part is the ordinary life it shows before the disaster, where it offers exhaustion instead of heroism.