I stopped at the dollar store at the mall and bought three rubber snakes too! Quite effective when used on the husband.
He dared me to toss them in the air during a scary snake moment, but I didn’t have quite the nerve…
It was gorier than I expected, but plenty of shrieks from me. The audience seemed to enjoy it tonight.
I really wish I’d had the nerve to toss those rubber snakes in the air…
Tried to see it tonight. Was not able to (due to a couple of people in the audence that thought he were there to listen to them and not to watch the movie, see the pit for more) may try again tomorrow.
It felt a bit more like cultural obligation than seeing a movie, but I had a good time. I especially liked how the audience clapped along with the jaunty opening-credits tune.
Like any B movie, it’s got your absurd premise (uh, duh), marginal acting, gratuitous nudity, nonsensical gore, made-ya-jump scares, even more absurd complications, presumed-dead-rising, foreshadowing that goes nowhere, pointless filler, false endings, and a jarringly simplistic resolution.
So: good stupid fun. Junk food for the soul. Mostly harmless. Just what you’d expect.
For a 10:45pm showing at a midtown Manhattan movie theater, though, there wasn’t much of an audience. My guess is that I saw it with about 50-75 people, but the auditorium could easily seat 500. That was a bit of a surprise. I hope it does well just because it would be cool for Sam Jackson to open a movie like this.
Oh, and there was a trailer for Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny - wheee! The crowd was so like: 
Okay, I’ll take the minority view - I just saw it, and I hated it.
I wish I had walked out, but I forced myself to sit through the whole thing. I blame no one but myself - I wanted to see it, and in fact I had to drag the Boy along. Now I’m apologizing to him.
By all means, I’m glad that most of you enjoyed it. Go you. I’m certainly not slagging on your opinions. Nonetheless, I hated it. Too gory, too predictable, too much. I have now seen snakes biting every taboo body part on a human, and I wish I hadn’t.
For me, the predictability was more fun than almost anything else. It was so cliché that it was a joke. I hate the action genre as a whole, and for me the fact that this movie was so obviously made from a formula was great fun.
Not to rain on your parade…
but…
what, exactly, were you expecting?
The audience really made it for me. There was a group of teenagers right in front and every time the film got sexual, romantic, or overly sentimental they’d toss their rubber snakes in the air and you could see it against the screen. The kids had exquisite timing- they never missed a chance, but they didn’t overplay the gag.
We were able to spot most of the various airplane movie cliches out there, and afterwards we spent a good half hour talking about little details that would have made it better (to us, at least). But we still loved the movie. As one person in our group put it, “That movie was far better than it had any right to be.”
I suppose I don’t know, exactly. Less gore? More left to the imagination? Or perhaps I just didn’t expect it to bother me as much as it did. I have a pretty high tolerance for disturbing imagery, but this movie got to me much more than I thought it would.
As I said, I accept responsibility for walking into (and sitting through) a movie that wasn’t my usual cinematic fare. I’m genuinely glad that so many people liked it…but I’d rather gouge my eyes out with knitting needles than sit through it again.
Got back about an hour ago.
It was a terrible movie. And yet, I was not disappointed at all.
The thing about it is, it had such a wonderful goofball 70’s B-movie vibe. Like it doesn’t give a shit whether or not it makes a lick of sense, it doesn’t spend any more time on the mechanics of the plot than is absolutely necessary, it just wants to blow through all the setup as fast as possible in order to then rock your socks off and make you spill your popcorn and go “aw, naw, they di’uhn’t.” It’s the Master of the Flying Guillotine of snakes-on-airplane movies. 
Favorite throwaway moment: when Sam holds Julianna close and murmurs, “I need you to be strong.” The whole audience took a beat, collectively looked at one another, and burst out laughing.
Re the CGI, Dooku, it’s pretty cartoony, and occasionally laughable, but, I mean, it’s Snakes on a Plane, man. Maybe it’s just me, but strict realism would feel sort of jarring.
Overall, I don’t know if I have any great desire to see it again anytime soon, at least until the inevitable Rocky Horror style audience participation starts to take shape. It’ll take a little while for the unfunny yo-yos to get all the obvious “oh, she is so dead” bullshit out of their systems and allow space for the legitimately humorous wisecracks to begin accumulating. When that happens: gold.
“Until”?
It started at the theatre I was in before we got past the commercials. The entire movie was subjected to commentary, jeering, laughing, several thunderous applause moments and one standing ovation. Best line; when the rapper guy apologizes for his shitty behaviour, someone in the audience yelled “Awww, he’s grows as a person!”
I think, to be honest, the experience will be less fun if it ends up becoming the Skinner box every “Rocky Horror” showing is. It was much more fun with the audience playing along with something they hadn’t seen before, rather than mindlessly following a script.
“Snakes on a Plane” is the best movie of the year, easily. No contest. I’m absolutely serious. Here we have a film that’ll make $150 million or more but be underrated for all time; it’s a wonderful, clever film, satirical without being dismissive of the audience. The filmmakers knew EXACTLY what they were doing; there is not one cheesy or cliched moment that wasn’t carefully planned to be exactly what it was and get exactly the reaction it got. It’s a step forward in cinema as an art form, the first (that I can think of) Hollywood big budget movie that relies on the audience to be part of the experience. It was truly magnificent.
I’m not sure if I will see this movie, but there’s one spoiler I want to have, since I read this thread.
Can someone tell me if they guy who throws the dog gets his comeuppance?
If that happens I think I can take it.
I haven’t yet seen this … er … film? Can I call it a film? Or is it “Images on A Strip of Plastic!”
Anyway, when Titanic was a success, Hollywood learned that long movie + historical + big-budget disaster film + love story = success, and gave us Pearl Harbor.
When Lord of the Rings was a success, Hollywood learned that fantasy + well-loved literature + big battle scenes + special effects = success, and gave us Narnia and Troy and stuff.
It already seems as if this film will easily recoup its production costs and then some (though I haven’t seen the numbers — that’s just a guess). So what’s Hollywood going to learn?
What does this film do, exactly, that provides a model from which Hollywood can learn? What’s the formula? Lack of pretension + public imagination + Internet groundswell + catering to the fan base + simple action movie? Is Sam Jackson essential or incidental to the formula? Or is it just disaster movie + monster movie + cop movie = profit?
Maybe this means Hollywood will give us some more B-grade films that don’t aspire to be high art cinema, that don’t pretend to be anything more than summer popcorn movies.
He acts like an ass the entire movie, and gets his comeuppance in the middle of the film when he is strangled and eaten by a boa contrictor.
I had some audience participation in the theater I was attending, but it was funny. These three guys were making just simple comments- their running gag was “Snakevision!” whenever we got a shot of the snakes’s POV. And there was a big bunch of applause when Sam says The Line.
Are there really airplanes big enough that they actually have a staircase between the two stories of the plane? That has to be the largest plane in the history of planes.
I saw the 10 p.m. show last night with a good friend of mine. We thought it might be a disappointment after all the hype, but we loved it! The theater wasn’t nearly as crowded as we’d expected, though - I guess most folks caught to 7 p.m. show, and maybe the fanatics took off work for the earlier shows. Perhaps due to the smaller crowd, there wasn’t as much audience participation as Rick Jay describes, but there was still a lot of cheering, laughing at the cheesier lines, screaming, etc. When that one guy went to the bathroom to take a piss and a snake bit his naughty bits there were a lot of gasps and talking while everyone had a long, collective moment of “Oh my God, they’re not going to . . . no, that’s awful . . . oh my God, they are . . . OH MY GOD! AUGGGHH!” It was awesome.
I don’t think I could see it again, though, because so much of the fun was of the “I can’t believe they just said/did that!” and I think knowing what’s going to happen would spoil that.
Oh, and my friend and I agreed that our favorite part was when Eddie Kim asks his henchmen what they’ve done to kill Sean, and the henchmen reply that they’ve used “our last option.” Like they’d written down a list of “Ways to Kill the Witness” and everything was crossed out except one line at the bottom of the page: Snakes on a Plane.
For what it’s worth, if I recall correctly, the exact line is"Don’t you think I’ve exhausted every option?"which I agree is an amazingly absurd thing to say.
Ah, thank you. I thought I didn’t have it quite right.
The line right after the line was something like (I don’t have it verbatim):
[spoiler]
“Everybody strap in, we’re blowing the fuckers out the windows!”
[/spoilers]
Althoug I enjoyed THE line, it is too obvious, amybe because we already know,that it was aded after the fact. Still it was great when the audience went crazy for it.
Overall I had a really good time at the movie. The movie was good fun, but it wasn’t great.
Baker
Just to let you know, a cat also gets it. In fact it is the first vitim of the snakes. Again you don’t actually see it, the snake goes into a cat carrier and you see the box shake and some cat screeching and that’s it. So you don’t mind the people dying?
I suppose you’re right, too much realism would have been weird. Still, I was hoping to see a few real snakes. Snakes are cool, and to have one slithering around on some unsuspecting victim would have been a nice chill. The CG quality reminded me of the sharks in Deep Blue Sea (a more entertaining Sam Jackson B movie, IMO) - the snakes dart around really fast so you can’t get too close a look at them. I could have used a few good fakey-looking rubber ones too. It’s funnier when the characters are terrified of the enormous rubber snake than when they are rolling around struggling with nothing.
Yeah, it looked badly pasted-in, and didn’t really match up emotionally with the rest of the scene. Like Sam was pretty calm both before and after, but for one sentence, he’s pissed off?
Actually, I noticed that all of the scenes that were obviously added for the “R” rating (the nudity, the swearing) all were done in super close-up, with similar backgrounds. It looked like someone slapped up a panel of cheap looking airplane plastic in their garage and filmed some boobs and ‘mothafukin’ this and that, then pasted them in to the final film.
Of course, the utter disregard for quality and consistency is kind of what makes it fun…
Sure, it was a 747. They usually are configured like that, with the first class cabin in the upstairs compartment.
If you’ve never been on one, they’re frickin’ huge. They are much, much bigger than almost any other passenger jet.