User Reviews

This thematic genre of disaster movies never lose his strength which had his peak on seventies, a German production that follow the same steps of the countless Airports, after some human error a small plane hit on the bottom of a huge Aircraft that lost his control but still flying, toward the highest elevation put in danger when the Aircraft reach a certain point that the plane got any sustentation due the rarefied air, however the aircraft was in a safe hands on his veteran and skillful pilot Michael Winkler (Peter Haber) and the young co-pilot Niclas (Von Pufendorf), until here a palatable beginning, then came the usual dreadful clichés very usual in this kind of genre, everybody has his own particular matters, although the worst still comes, several characters had invited by the crew to help on the damage area located at load compartment which has a large hole in the floor, it dragged many passengers to death and believe or not the Pilot, such unbelievable odd happenings scratch the already groggy and agonizing picture, let it see as killing time only!!

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First watch: 2020 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 4.5

Airliner disaster films were a particularly popular but dire form of the 1970s disaster film. The brilliant Airplane! made sure you could never watch these films with a straight face again, but the sub-genre had already degenerated to such self-parody that only the better gags really distinguish the film from the contemporaneous "straight" effort The Concorde. With new effects technologies and a new dearth of ideas ushering the return of the disaster film in the 2000s, this German film inexplicably tries to play the airborne disaster scenario without any hint of irony, as if all its laughed-out clichés were shiny and new innovations.

Hence ten minutes into the film, we have an airliner without controls climbing towards a fatal stall, while the ground control, an anxious airline suit and a greasy government minister debate whether to shoot the plane down, before it crashes in the middle of Berlin. On board are all the requisite stereotypes: a stern but solid captain haunted by a past incident; a cocky young co-pilot and a failed medical student who have to rise to the challenge; an insecure engineer with vital technical know-how; a stupid and cowardly bully; and a cute kid who helps save the day. Fatalities and survivors are telegraphed early on, so the ride itself becomes the focus.

And the film does pull out all the stops, quickly jettisoning any unwieldy ballast like sense of reality, laws of physics and finally even internal consistency in order to keep the ill-fated plane and its long-suffering passengers constantly building up to an immediate disaster, only to defuse it again at the last moment. It is crassly manipulative, shamelessly sentimental and cynically exploitative. And yet it is well made and can offer a single engaging ride, as long as the audience don't engage their frontal lobes too much. I'm actually amazed that someone had the bottle to even make this film.

Films about airplane malfunctions or crashes are some of the most tense movies out there. The concept behind those movies is that realism can put fear into the viewers minds due to the fact that it shows what could happen in a mid air collision, hull breach or anything like that. But this movie is far off this concept.

The movie seems to try to be unrealistic in every single scene. Nothing of what happens in this movie is based on fact. So it is not science fiction, right? That's why this is not a "Star Wars physics criticism" type of review. This is much worse. I will not waste the readers time and explain every mistake but just a few: The airport (in the film) does not have parallel runways, as you can see in one shot but the controller confuses rwys 12L and 21L; the whole runway confusion scene is just ridiculous; what is a service plane?; why doesn't the landing aircraft's pilot see the car on the runway - or why is the plane's glide slope so steep that the pilot can't see that car on the rwy?; you can't enter a "alpha" into the transponder; no plane has a master alert sign which flashes in the MFD; the whole idea of an aircraft stalling during climb with the engines at take-off thrust is just stupid; hail to the pilot's lungs! He can breathe at over 31000 feet and claims that the air will get very thin soon - respect!; why is the ground team able to predict the crash site of the craft when it's still an hour away?; how can they download the flight computer's OS and... why?; the tornados are eurofighters when shown from a distance; what kind of an airplane is that anyway? No fly-by-wire system but a fly-by-bowden-cable system. Nice!; The fat guy uses a bike tyre as an air tank; why do they need an electrical engineer for a task that a monkey could do?; the pilots do not seem to be fully occupied, as they have time for minute-long speeches in the cabin; pilots do not switch seats; a pilot would NEVER assign the stewardess the task of switching the gear lever - and why would he anyway?; a human being cannot lift a human body hanging from a hole in the plane: The wind drag would rip him out of the plane as well; the international speed unit is KIAS or knots indicated airspeed or simple knots - definitely not kph; the pilot switches the engines off (using the emergency shut down ;-), to reduce the speed further. Wise choice! The rest is just too dumb to explain - believe me. If you want to reduce your chance of getting brain cancer: Just don't watch this film.