Movie Review of Flightplan (2005)

It goes without saying that Jodie Foster was great in this movie.  She's great in any movie.  Her strong performance actually created many of the red herrings thrown to undermine an otherwise predictable script.

Jodie Foster stars as Kyle Pratt, a propulsion engineer whose husband recently fell from a tall building and was killed.  She's uprooted her six-year-old daughter from their home in Berlin, in order to return to Kyle's hometown in the USA. 

So far, so tragic, but things take a turn into strangeness, when little Julia Pratt disappears.  As one person tells Kyle, the airplane is fundamentally a large tube.  How far could a young girl wander?

But there's a bigger question here.  Kyle's husband committed suicide.  His coffin is in the hold.  Kyle is on medication and she admits to having taken a walk around Berlin with her husband's ghost.  She's paranoid and dazed.  Was her daughter ever even there?  According to ground control, Julia was in her father's arms when he jumped.

This could either be a movie about a woman slowly going insane in a public, confined space.  Or it could be about an unlikely abduction.  Jodie Foster's strong performance makes both interpretations seem feasible. The crew, other passengers and viewers are kept guessing until the climactic ending.

How we seem to those all around us is possibly one of our most all-consuming pre-occupations.  For most, it emerges in wearing the right clothes, listening to the right music, passing exams and getting an appropriate job, buying the correct things and living in the proscribed place.  We're so unduly concerned with fitting in and being popular, that the notion that we simply lose control is beyond comprehension.

Not coping in public, in front of strangers is bad enough; but what about actually going insane?

I've seen this as a fictional device before. Neil Gaiman uses this concept to great effect in Neverwhere.  Allowing oneself to descend into genuine public madness and despair was one of the great challenges placed upon the protagonist.  It beat even taking on a Champion in battle.

For both Kyle Pratt and Neverwhere's Richard Mayhew, those watching on are left cringing on their behalf.  Yet we're still working out what we'd do in their situation.

It's quite rare to find a movie which passes the Bechdel Test with quite the aplomb of Flightplan.  There were numerous examples to pick and choose between.

Testing the representation of female roles in movies, the Bechdel Test asks that there be more than one named woman or girl.  She has to have a conversation with another female; and it can't be about male characters.

Kyle Pratt spoke with her daughter Julia in the opening scenes, and several named female flight attendants, as well as a female therapist on board.  The majority of those conversations were about airplanes (Kyle is a propulsion engineer, who had helped build the plane they were flying on) or her daughter.

It passed the Bechdel Test hands down.