Flightplan (2005)

Flightplan arrives from 2005, a year when a thriller could still solve its problems with a fire extinguisher and a locked cockpit door. Jodie Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an aviation engineer who helped design the very aircraft on which her daughter vanishes. She spends the middle act doubted by every flight attendant and pilot aboard, then spends the final act dismantling their aircraft from the inside. The film hands her competence without commentary, which is a modest form of progress and nothing more. No speeches accompany it. She simply knows how the plane works, and the plane is the point.

The screenplay carries a distinct residue of post-September 11 anxiety. Kyle accuses two Arab passengers of stalking her child, a scuffle follows, and the film later reveals those men to be innocent and even helpful. The gesture subverts a trope, though it does so through plot mechanics instead of a monologue, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. The original draft featured terrorists; the rewrite removed them and left the paranoia floating free. What remains is a thriller that trusts its own suspense. The villains want fifty million dollars, not a better world or a worse one.

The production is sleek, the pacing deliberate, the resolution absurd in the way that late-period potboilers often are. Foster anchors it with a performance of clenched, unglamorous fury. There is little here that speaks to the contemporary cultural moment, and the film seems content with that. It wants to frighten us about overhead bins. It succeeds, briefly, and then the credits roll over a Newfoundland runway and we are left to file it accordingly: a competent exercise with almost no ideological freight to declare at customs.

Such films are increasingly rare, and their modesty deserves a note in the ledger before we move along to the next specimen that insists on teaching us something. Flightplan teaches nothing. It merely locks the door and turns out the lights, which, on its own terms, is enough. The classification committee can rest easy on this one. So can the flight attendants, who need not have worried so loudly after all. The ransom was paid, the daughter survived, and the sommelier finds the vintage thin but drinkable, with no lingering aftertaste of agenda. We move on to the next bottle.

Thematic tags: box_office_number_one. The film opened at number one in the United States and Canada, grossing twenty-four point six million dollars in its opening weekend, a fact that history has recorded without editorial comment. It is not a sequel, not a remake in any official sense despite its debts to Hitchcock, not a true story, not adapted from a book, and contains no superheroes. Its Oscars remain absent.