Flight

Robert Zemeckis’s 2012 film shows its hand in the opening scene: we watch Whip drink and take cocaine before he boards, long before any investigator gets there. The tension therefore never rests on whether he did it. It rests on whether he will say so out loud. The second reversal is structural. The flying finishes early and the film never goes back up; what remains is a hospital room, his late father’s farm, a guarded hotel room and an NTSB hearing. The production explains that plainness. The 31 million dollar budget was possible because Zemeckis and Denzel Washington waived their usual fees; the shoot ran 45 days near Atlanta, and Scroggins Aviation supplied three decommissioned MD-80s. The inverted dive was loosely drawn from the 2000 Alaska Airlines 261 crash, in which the crew did fly the aircraft upside down but could not recover it. On set the cockpit and fuselage turned on real gimbals while the exterior aircraft was added digitally. At the 85th Academy Awards it took two nominations, lead actor and original screenplay, and won neither. A good fit if you can accept that the verdict is delivered in scene one and give the rest to watching a confession arrive late. Not for you if you came for the aircraft, which leaves early and never comes back.