Probably not a good thread for the fear of flying crowd. So I’m watching Cast Away for about the twentieth time on FX and it got me wondering what are some other good depictions (descriptions) of a plane crash.
Die Hard 2 (1990)
Alive (1993)
Fight Club (1999)
Cast Away (2000)
Lost (TV 2004–2010)
For print, I offer up this near crash from Ken Grimwood’s Replay. (Replay BTW, is believed to have inspired the movie, Groundhog Day, only the protagonist, instead of reliving a single day, relives entire decades of his life. And while we’re on near-crashes, there’s always this one from Michael Crichton’s Airframe.
Alive seemed the most realistic to me. I remember it more vividly than Cast Away, yet I saw that movie more recently. Maybe it’s because I read the book as an impressionable seventh grader, and had been thinking of it off and on since that time and seeing the movie. Mostly though it seemed to be so long. Like you were crashing with them, in real time.
The movie was retarded and annoying, but that plane crash scene was amazing even when I watched the movie on my PC. It must have been very intense on the big screen.
There’s a great scene in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly where Tuco is about to be hanged. He’s standing with his head in the noose and someone reads off the charges against him in a dull monotone. No dramatic camera angles and music, no looks of grim duty on any of their faces; it’s made more terrifying because it’s so commonplace and mundane. It’s like they do this every day of the week and no one will even remember this one.
At the beginning of The Right Stuff is the narration about test pilots coming to the high desert to chase the demon who lives at mach 1. “Whiskey-Kilo-two-eight, do you wish to declare an emergency?” “Negative, Whiskey-Kilo-two…”
Boom.
Then the Friend of Widows and Orphans walking up to a house, a small funeral, and hanging his picture behind the bar at Pancho’s.
Check out the Wiki entry on that B-52 crash, its cause was the pilot being a reckless selfish arrogant hotdogging asshole who essentially manslaughtered his entire crew.
I would vote the Alive scene over the Cast Away one, simply because it was full of terrified passengers. Speaking of, I’ve never watched it and don’t know when/if I ever will, but what about United 93? Or does it tactfully end before it?
Is it just me, or is this post really hard to follow? What does The Good, The Bad and The Ugly have to do with plane crashes? The Friend of Widows and Orphans? Huh?
I also thought of Cast Away as soon as I read the thread title.
Eyebrows of Doom, if you’ve ever seen “The Right Stuff” the friends of widows and orphans is basically this “angel of death guy,” a pastor who goes out to tell the wife that her husband has died in a test plane crash. It happens so often at the air base that it becomes a mundane task for him. I think Robot Arm was using “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as a parallel example. Kind of saying that the routine plane crashes were horrifying in that people had become inured to them.
Another thing that makes that crash even scarier is that there were nuclear weapons not far away from where it crashed. (Although supposedly there was no risk of detonation even if the B-52 had crashed even closer to them.)
As for on-screen crashes, I thought the recreation of Howard Hughes’ 1946 XF-11 plane crash in The Aviator was pretty nail-biting.
Shawn has it. All the other examples in this thread are of big, dramatic moments; lots of screaming and panic and Big Scary Things happening. It’s scary in a different way to treat these things as if they’re normal and to be expected.
In the book, Tom Wolfe talks about how the news will spread among the pilot’s wives, and that one of them will be visited by a kindly man, a friend of widows and orphans. In the movie, it’s an actual character; the base chaplain at Edwards played by Royal Dano. He is death, waiting for anyone who fucks up.
I like how you put that. It makes sense. But I found the crash in* Fearless* to be the most terrifying depiction of a plane crash in fiction because it seemed so realistic. No over-dramatization–much less “exciting” than your typical movie plane crash. And THAT, to me, is why it was incredibly terrifying.
So I’m watching Cast Away for about the twentieth time on FX and it got me wondering what are some other good depictions (descriptions) of a plane crash.
