airplanes

The Aviator (2004)

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I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through Martin Scorsese’s filmography; I gave a rundown of what I’ve been up to in my Cape Fear review here, and I’ve worked my way from having only previously seen Shutter Island, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and The Last Waltz as of last year to now also having seen Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear (obviously), Casino, and now The Aviator. At about halfway into the film’s staggering 171-minute runtime, I turned to my friend and stated that, although I understand that this might be a heretical opinion, I thought it was so far Scorsese’s best work that I had seen. After viewing the film’s more meandering and slow-moving second half, I’m not so sure that’s the case, but it may still very well be my favorite. All cards on the table, however, almost all of that enjoyment comes in the form of an absolutely marvelous performance from Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, which having just watched Suddenly Last Summer, it’s pitch-perfect and an utter joy to watch. That the film becomes less interesting when Hepburn moves on from being courted by the playboy Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) to starting her affair with the still-married Spencer Tracy, as she did in real life, is not a surprise. 

The Aviator is the story of one Howard Hughes, whose Houston-based family business made a fortune in drill bits for oil wells, and the film opens on Hughes engaging in his two great passions: aviation (naturally) and movies. He hires Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) to manage his business so that he can put all of his attention into the completion of his war picture Hell’s Angels, a cause which ultimately takes him over three years and costs $4M ($77.3M in 2025, adjusted for inflation), nearly bankrupting him, but catapulting him into the public consciousness as the archetypal 20th Century Renaissance Man: a brilliant engineer, a playboy with the most beautiful women in Hollywood, and an artist. He also completely seizes up under any kind of greater attention, represented by him having a “whiteout” as the frame fills with light. Hepburn is immediately drawn to him, and the couple’s romance is quite a lot of fun, as she’s an unconventional woman who’s drawn to him, dazzled but not blinded, and she helps to ground him. His ongoing filmmaking career leads him to dalliances with other actresses while his oversight of Hughes Aircraft demands more of his attention, and after a disastrous visit to the Hepburn family compound, the two split up. All of this is intercut with Hughes continuing to design and engineer various aircraft, with one such plane making him, at the time, the fastest man who had ever lived. 

When we did our podcast episode about Boogie Nights, Brandon drew a connection between it and Goodfellas, specifically in both films’ bifurcation into a “fuck around” half and a “find out” half, with 1980 as the dividing line. Casino has that same symmetrical structure, and The Aviator does too, among some other Scorsese-isms that I’ve started to notice, like federal agents being used for petty retaliation and planes running out of fuel while flying over golf courses. Unlike in Casino and Goodfellas, however, the main character’s downfall in the “find out” back half are a result of Hughes’s mental illnesses, rather than a more traditional tragic flaw, like Sam Rothstein’s need to be envied or Henry Hill’s inability to break free from the allure of the power that organized crime gave him. The film essentially shouts at you through a bullhorn that Scorsese sees himself in Hughes and although he doesn’t shy away from portraying Hughes’s outlandish behavior like extremely precise eating habits, obsessive handwashing (to the point of causing himself to bleed), and paranoid wiretapping of his girlfriend Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale)’s phones, it’s not those things that bring Hughes down. Scorsese’s Hughes is a Randian achievement of infamy by merit, precision, and perfectionism, and his failures have to be that he’s too much of a perfectionist and he pushes himself past his limits — the kinds of things that you would disingenuously call weaknesses in a job interview. The appearance of an antagonizing force in the form of PanAm president Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and his senator patsy Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) moves the narrative along but it’s not really Trippe or Brewster that Hughes is ever really fighting; it’s himself and his increasingly severe compulsive acts. Once he overcomes the agoraphobia he develops following the latest of several experimental aircraft crashes and delivers a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style speech to Brewster’s subcommittee, the narrative thrust has hit its climax. Hughes was an ubermensch, albeit an eccentric one, and Scorsese is the Hughes of the film world. 

I’ll admit that this is an easy leap to make when interacting with any text, but there’s a special focus on Hughes’s tenderness in his approach to the machines that he creates. Hughes doesn’t do “test pilots”; he gets out there and he flies the thing himself, and the fact that his cockpit and his director’s chair are the same seat is made very literal early on when he flies around amidst the pilots shooting Hell’s Angels. When something doesn’t work, he keeps trying, even when the need for it has passed. He first dreams up the “Hercules” air carrier as a means to help the troops in WWII, but despite taking government development money, he doesn’t get the thing completed until after the war is over because it has to be perfect, just like a film has to be perfected before it gets sent out to the general public, even if doing so means that it misses its cultural moment. I have to admit that none of that is all that interesting to me, just like I’m not really all that interested in any of the film’s various historical inaccuracies (the film presents Hughes as making his firebrand subcommittee speech after coming out of his reclusive “locked in a movie theater and pissing in jars” period, when in fact the committee hearings were 1947, a solid ten years prior to his 1957 isolation). What is interesting to me is that this is a film that I don’t think could be made today.

The Aviator was released during what was probably the last time the general public was willing to accept an epic narrative about a real life “hero” of public stature. Contemporary figures of equivalent wealth, status, and public identity are far too accessible to the general public, and the extent to which some of the most powerful people in the world have sacrificed their mystery and allure on the altar of social media (not to mention their morals and ethics) and flat-out embarrassed themselves on an international stage means that they’ve forsaken any awe or reverence that they might have otherwise had. The pursuit of being the most liked boy by a vocal minority of people who are overrepresented online has shattered any opportunity for a contemporary millionaire inventor to be respected, for better or worse, not to mention that it’s fundamentally broken many of our critical institutions. Retroactively, it makes this entire genre seem like propaganda, and it probably always was, intentionally or not. That’s just the way of the future. 
Finally, I found this one a fun experiment in seeing what Scorsese would do with a more family-oriented picture. Most of his films are R-rated and notoriously so, with Goodfellas setting the record for the most uses of the word “fuck” in a movie at 300, a record that was broken five years later with 422 uses in Casino, and when the upper records started getting a little crowded, The Wolf of Wall Street had 569 uses in 2013. I’m no moral guardian, but I will say that there’s something to be said for playing around with moderation as The Aviator, as a PG-13 film, got exactly one “fuck” and it hit a lot harder than any single or cumulative use in the other Scorsese pictures I’ve seen. Part of this is the nature of the setting, which allows for Blanchett’s Hepburn to gush out “Golly!” and many other early period accurate transatlanticisms (and it’s a hoot every time). Scorsese usually goes for broke by leaning into the extremes, and it was interesting to see him do something different. This wasn’t his first non-R film, of course, as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, and The King of Comedy were all rated PG (albeit they predate the PG-13 rating), as is The Age of Innocence, and his Dali Lama picture Kundun was PG-13, but this feels like his first movie that you could catch on cable on a Saturday afternoon during a family get together and reasonably expect most of the people present to enjoy it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Fight or Flight (2025)

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Ironically, Fight or Flight seems to be flying under the radar. The new action comedy from first time feature director James Madigan is a lot of hyperactive, frenetic fun, even when some of the comedy thuds a bit. Some of that may fall on the writing duo of Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona. McLaren’s only previous writing credit is for the 2018 direct-to-Netflix Theo James vehicle How it Ends, while this is Cotrona’s first credit in that category after several years as an actor, most notably as the lead in the From Dusk till Dawn TV series. Despite some weak jokes that fail to land (no pun intended), this is still a pretty fun ride (no pun intended). And hey, stars of both of the turn of the millennium Halloween sequels (Josh Hartnett from 1998’s H20 and Katee Sackhoff from 2002’s Resurrection) appear in a movie together, even if they never share the screen at the same time. That’s something, right? 

Hartnett is Lucas Reyes, who’s drinking himself to death in exile in Bangkok. Stateside, Katherine Brunt (Sackhoff) is busy leading a shadowy quasi-government agency/surveillance network. Her subordinate, Hunter (White Lotus’s Julian Kostov), informs her of a failed unauthorized action that resulted in an explosion in Asia, and that it appears that the incident involved “The Ghost,” a “black hat hacker” and terrorist about which no agency has ever been able to get any information. An overzealous lackey manages to find nearby footage that has been edited to remove the Ghost, Dead Reckoning style, and they extrapolate that they are headed for the Bangkok airport, with the nearest action team too far away to get there in time. Reluctantly, Brunt calls on Reyes, promising to clear up his legal status and allow him to come home. All he has to do is get on the plane, discover the identity of the Ghost and safely take them into custody, and deliver them to the agency alive when the plane lands in San Francisco. Should be simple, except that once they’re airborne, Brunt learns that this whole thing is a trap for the Ghost; an all points bounty has been put out for them, meaning that the plane is full of potential assassins. 

That’s a concept that’s both high and a little broey, and it’s no surprise that when the jokes don’t work it’s because it leans into the latter rather than the former. After I had already groaned at the hyperactive stagey performance of the high-strung air steward Royce (Danny Ashok), what really thudded for me was one of the scenes that revealed more about the conspiracy. Brunt and Hunter take a walk outside of the agency’s headquarters as they discuss who knew what and when and whether or not one of them has any involvement in the leaking of the Ghost’s location, and there’s a lot of hay made (tediously) about how life is all about being top dog, full of machismo from both characters. When they end the discussion, they’ve reached a nearby waterfront, where a yoga class is being conducted by a long-haired hippie type; after they express their mutual disgust at this display, Brunt shakes her head and utters “Pussies.” It’s such a strange little cul-de-sac that exists for no reason other than to show Brunt and Hunter as adversaries vying for the position of alpha, with the oh-so-funny comical turn that it’s a woman calling people pussies. It’s these kinds of things that make this film feel weirdly out of touch in certain places, where ten percent edgelordiness seeps over and cheapens the whole thing. 

Of course, the film is kind of a throwback in other ways. The “X on a plane” format is probably best remembered for giving us Snakes on a Plane, but this is more reminiscent of nineties skybound thrillers like Con Air and Air Force One, with a little bit of Final Destination-esque plane depressurization thrown in for good measure (this is not a spoiler; it’s the first scene). It’s got the shady government agency staffed by former CIA and other operatives but which now operates under a banner that remains undisclosed until fairly late in the game, and the conspiratorial actions that they perpetrate have a distinctly pre-War on Terror feel — more Enemy of the State than The Bourne Identity, although when the film shifts into fight sequences it utilizes the shaky cam effects canonized in that series before becoming the default in virtually every action thriller today. There’s also the presence of an inexplicably powerful supercomputer that the Ghost has created and which represents a threat to certain intelligence infrastructure, and the fact that this asset may be the reason that the Ghost was herded onto an airplane with assassins in the first place. Maybe because I was already in that headspace, this element felt very 90s to me as well, as the writing felt intentionally designed to imitate that “computers can do anything” optimism/fearmongering of the era, from uploading a virus to an alien mothership in Independence Day to deleting your entire identity in The Net. More depressingly, the film acts as if exposing governments and corporations for their exploitation of third world labor and participation in human trafficking would somehow have a negative effect on those entities. The reality that we all inhabit here in 2025 is one where people are still in the highest offices of power despite damning evidence of their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and people still upgrade their phones every time there’s a new status symbol with full knowledge that they come from sweatshops that “employ” children. It’s cute that the film thinks that the Ghost’s wikileak might have some impact on anything at all; I wish I still had that kind of optimism. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sole Survivor (1983)

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EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

“Before there was Final Destination, there was Sole Survivor,” proudly proclaims Code Red’s 2008 DVD release of 1983 indie horror film Sole Survivor. There are some superficial similarities between the two, notably a plane crash, psychic visions, “accidents” aimed at the survivor of said crash, and a scene with a coroner that helps explain the film’s plot, but the two films are different in execution and concept, and I daresay the older, cheaper, and admittedly somewhat sloppier film is superior. The Final Destination series’ bread-and-butter was constructing tension through shots of elaborate Rube Goldbergian death traps falling into place in order to lead those characters who managed to cheat death into a gruesome end. Directed by Thom Eberhardt, whose inarguably classic film Night of the Comet premiered just one year later, 1983’s Sole Survivor lacks the kind of frenetic energy that characterizes the more modern film and its sequels. Instead, there is a quiet intensity to it, and I was surprised by how haunting some of the imagery was. For instance, in the first sequence of the film, Karla (Caren Larkey) awakes after having a psychic vision of Denise (Anita Skinner) strapped to her airplane seat, placid with shock, surrounded by a rustic field strewn with debris and broken bodies. Later in the film, Denise is trapped in an underground parking garage, and she is first seen only in beautifully composed long shots, before she begins running and quick film splices are made as support beams pass between her and the camera, in a scene reminiscent of the oft-referenced behind-the-columns transformation from The Twilight Zone‘s “The Howling Man.” Eberhadt also edited the film, and cinematographer Russell Carpenter went on to a fairly distinguished career, working as the director of photography for James Cameron in the nineties (notable highlights include being D.P. on both True Lies and Titanic, the latter of which earned him an Oscar). This was the first film for both of them, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from a purely aesthetic standpoint, despite the film’s issues with pacing.

After an effectively unsettling cold open of a bloodied and armed woman riding a bus past closed shops full of mannequins on a Christmas-season evening, we see the same woman sitting in a field surrounded by body parts and airplane debris, in the scene mentioned above. It’s the last chance for actress Karla Davis, an over-the-hill former starlet who was blacklisted because her psychic visions (perceived by producers to simply be delusions brought on by alcohol use) made her too difficult to work with. She awakes after dreaming of Denise’s plane crash and tries to convince her agent to warn her, but he ignores her. Later, Denise is rushed to the hospital for treatment by the dreamy doctor Brian Richardson (Kurt Johnson, who unfortunately died of AIDS-related illness in 1986 at only 33), who is attracted to her but is concerned that she is masking her survivor’s guilt, as she seems to simply feel lucky to survive. After seeing an apparition of a soaked girl and nearly being crushed by a truck with no driver, Denise is taken home by her neighbor, a 19 year old party girl named Kristy (Robin Davidson), whose parents are absent for the course of the film.

Karla has great difficulty completing her work on the coffee commercial that Denise is producing. She is distracted and zoned out, and she tells Denise about her visions. Denise continues to experience inexplicable events, like a man appearing on the road and driving her onto the shoulder, an elevator with a mind of its own that deposits her in an underground garage where she is menaced by a ghoulish troublemaker, and a creepy figure standing in the rain watching from across the street as she and Richard have dinner. It’s very atmospheric and intriguing, and the composition of the images makes the sections of the film in which little happens more intriguing and intense. There’s a sharp turn around the hour mark, however, when it is revealed that the spectres haunting Denise are not the spirits of those who died in the crash, as one expects, but reanimated corpses. It’s never made clear why the supernatural force that Denise theorizes is trying to end her because she survived the crash would go about reanimating corpses to fulfill its goal, or why it targets people other than Denise, but this is not a movie that gets bogged down in those particular details.

Larkey, who financed the film along with her husband, appears in the special features in a ten minute interview alongside Eberhardt, and they discuss the fact that they wanted to produce a low-budget movie and hopefully make a return on their investment; they mention that with their budget, they could have made either a horror or a sexploitation flick, so they took the high road. Unfortunately, the film was financially unsuccessful. The film passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors with a cast mostly made up of women, and there’s some great dialogue to punch up some of the more static moments. (My favorite line comes when Roxie, the ditzy but spiritually curious friend of Kristy says she has seen God; when asked what he looked like, she says he was “Not great, like he wasn’t eating right or something.” That’s one for the ages, honestly.) The film was released on Vestron VHS in 1985, but Code Red’s out-of-print DVD is release from seven years ago is the only release on contemporary media; despite the not-great mono sound mix, I recommend checking it out if you can find a copy, for the imagery if nothing else. Unlike a lot of cheaply made horror movies from that era, this one stands up.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond