Review of Flightplan (2005) by Thecriticator — 29 May 2021

The underlying narrative of the film was 9/11, Bush-era War on Terror politics and how scared people blindly follow authority like the Stanley Milgram experiment. This film was made in 2005.

A corrupt and sociopathic U.S. air marshal wants to extort $50 million from an airline company. He'll accomplish this by gaslighting Jodie Foster, a passenger with a missing daughter, into a psychotic breakdown that her missing daughter never existed. He kidnapped the daughter, somehow without no one noticing. He manages to get the entire plane to see her as crazy and delusional and accelerating the situation enough to force the plane to land. Then the airline will simply hand over the money to the bad guy for some reason. And according to his character as he brags in the final fight scene with Jodie Foster where they just **** around playing hide-n-seek on the plane, that if we talk with enough authority you can get people to do anything (a reference to Bush-era politics like the Patriot Act). That was his plan. Just talk your way into $50 mil.

To re-cap: Jodie Foster is on a plane, and her daughter is mysteriously kidnapped mid-flight while asleep in their seats by bad people with predictable motives: money. Jodie and daughter are flying from Germany to NYC because her husband mysteriously died in Germany and they are taking his body back to the US. The villain targets Jodie Foster for this reason. They don't bother to explore the circumstances as to why the husband is dead, and make it seem like he was murdered. Back to the missing daughter. The problem about this scenario is that they're on a plane that's in the air. There's no way to kidnap someone and get away it in that setting without the 400 passengers and crew noticing. Of course there's flight crew that are in on the $50 mil scheme, and erase the daughter's info on the manifest and reinforce the fake notion the daughter never existed. Building on 9/11 politics, Jodie Foster accuses Arabic passengers of being the culprits. It creates a commotion and she's seen as a crazy racist and the captain no longer listens to her. They try to convince Jodie Foster her daughter is not existent, but there's a problem: Jodie Foster presents the daughter's passport to captain and crew to prove her daughter is real. The bad guys stole the boarding pass and luggage of the girl, but didn't think to take the passport. This means you can easily figure out the manifest was tampered with. So to save face the villain convinces the captain the girl is dead and being carried on board in the coffin in the cargo bay and that Jodie Foster in a delusional state of denial. What??? After more gaslighting Jodie Foster pushes buttons to uncover the truth. Bad air marshal man tells the captain Jodie Foster is a terrorist manufacturing the scheme to get $50 mil and that he needs to land the plane. What ??? The captain complies without questioning the air marshal when so many red flags now exist. The captain heard three pieces of conflicting information from the air marshal the entire movie, and all of a sudden Jodie Foster is a terrorist leader that he believes? Again, the theme of talking with authority leads people to not think and just follow. We find the daughter. The villain stored illegal stuff in the coffin because coffins don't get x-rayed, and there is a final fight. Why did the villain even need to kidnap the kid to make this plan work? If the bad guys managed to sneak weapons on the plane in the coffin, and the villain has obvious access to the cargo and engineering areas of the plane, he could've just done that. Absolutely nothing about kidnapping the kid and convincing her mother she doesn't exist translates logically to getting $50 mil. Villain is weak and dies easily. They had no plan when they got the plane on the ground. It was basically a speech about how stupid people follow authority. Jodie Foster has her daughter at the end. Strong woman smart, not manipulated. Captain and passengers dumb and easily manipulated. Movie over.