Within the first few minutes I said, "This has got to be a satire." I was hooked, "What kind of movie is this?" The male flight attendant confirmed this first impression by dancing down the aisle singing, while passengers jeered and told him to shut up. Soft lighting on the female flight attendant, harsh lighting on the protagonist. Was the first a robotic Stepford Wife? The latter anorexic? Every few minutes another plot, dialog, continuity or prop error. What was going on? What kept my attention was anticipating the next jolting persistence of disbelief. "Look at that!" "It's pathetic!" "Who wrote, directed, DPed, lit the scenes and created the FX?" "Didn't anyone on the set notice?" I thought of Dolly Parton's words, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." The conversations with flight control were wrong and the flight controller's screens were of Los Angeles. The fights were clumsy. Others reviewers have listed the most egregious shots. I took delight in chalking up each fault. The final scene of the protagonists parachuting had me almost out of my seat: there they were, together at last, probably standing on the floor with harness and rope disappearing off the screen above. The ubiquitous fake snow flying (or was it sandpaper on a rotating drum) and yet they didn't sway one millimeter during their descent, if it was supposed to be a descent. They were as fixed as statues with the Himalayan alps silhouetted in the background. "It takes a lot of work to make a film this bad." A film this bad can make us all feel good...
Review of Altitude
