The movie 7500, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, isn’t too bad. It’s not Earth-shattering, change-your-life great, but a decent use of around 90 minutes.
Gordon-Levitt plays the First Officer on a German airliner going from Berlin to Paris. The story starts with the cabin and flight crews boarding the aircraft, an Airbus A319, and bringing it to life. There isn’t any soapy backstory on anyone except that the FO has a kid with one of the flight attendants. It gives what appears to be a pretty realistic depiction of the routine beginning of a flight.
Bad guys gain access to the cockpit and the flight is hijacked. I won’t spoil how it happened, but it seemed plausible to me. At this point, the drama is joined.
The thing that didn’t work for me was the pilot’s response to the hijacking.
The hijackers are successfully pushed out of the cockpit, but they retain control of the passenger cabin. Gordon-Levitt regains flight control of the aircraft, communicates the flight’s distress, and receives instructions to divert to Hanover. So far so good.
-
The FO announces to the passengers that they will be landing in Hannover. Information is power in this situation. Why would the FO make any announcement to the passengers? Don’t let the hijackers have any idea what your plan is.
-
It seems to me that it would be possible to safely fly the aircraft while making sure that no one in the cabin could remain on his/her feet. Bounce the hijackers all over the floor, ceiling, walls, each other. Keep them literally off balance while making for Hanover. Some passengers may be injured in the process, but that has to be better than allowing the hijackers to have their way with the passengers. It did not go well for some of the folks in back. Is there a reason why our intrepid FO didn’t think to do this, except for just a brief moment when it was too late to do any good?
Anyway, I pretty much enjoyed to movie. I was disappointed that they made the hijackers Muslim extremists. The motives of the hijackers was irrelevant to the story being told. It would have been better if they just left the audience wondering.