7500


This is a tense air drama of the kind you don’t see these days. Airport 75 may be a classic of sorts but real-life hijackings and disasters happened between that date and now, and now every drama of its kind is compared to United 93: a film that was based on the greatest tragedy of our century, and was so apparently authentic as to make anything else seem less of a movie.


And it’s good, in a way. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is on top form in a serious dramatic role as a pilot who’s in control of an airliner flying from Berlin to Paris. He’s American, and doesn’t speak German: just one of the few details that we learn at the top of the movie which helps propel the human drama. Another set-up: the screen that allows the people in the cockpit to see who is at the door so they can decide whether to unlock it or not. When the pilots are being served their food, hijackers make their way into the cockpit and that’s when it becomes a taut psychological drama.


This isn’t about politics: the hijackers’ aims are never stated. When one of them is in the cockpit there is unseen terror heard in the background, and the hijackers manage to get the door open so that the main conflict in the story is between Levitt’s Tobias Ellis and Vedat (Omid Memar)—whose nationality is not relevant to the story either. Vedat is the archetypal sympathetic bad guy: but then all the others are nameless, shouty murderous thugs—but Tobias is able to persuade Vedat not to kill him. 


Parts of the film depict some harrowing violence and the tense builds up to the maximum a couple of times when the story is getting established. Then it gets to a point where the ending is fairly easy to work out. Joseph Gordon-Levitt carries all the weight here because he makes you care about the story even though it’s impossible not to root for his survival and the attacker’s failure.


Having a film in one location works very well if the writing is good, and this is a pretty good film. It’s not a long film, and it’s not got any sophisticated story tricks or message of any kind: it’s about a person being challenged to a life-threatening duel of the mind with an unlikable protagonist. But Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fantastic.

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