A commercial airliner crashes in the middle of the ocean through a variety of factors. Such as, poor maintenance, disregard for regulations by both the captain (Ben Kingsley) and the guy at the x-ray machine for the luggage, and a particularly selfish and conceited dickhead (Angus Simpson) that stored flammable shit in his suitcase.
Despite the best efforts of the first officer (Aaron Eckhart), the plane's belly gets caught on a coral reef during the ditch attempt, upends, and falls to pieces. The survivors are scattered between various sections, dealing with injuries, the sort of poor decision-making that comes with terror, and a lot of really hungry sharks.
You got a hodgepodge of brave stewardesses, two e-gamers that can't confess their feelings for one another, an aggro jock and his more reasonable teammate, a recently re-married couple and the kids each is bringing into the relationship, a grandmother and a dorky guy who repeatedly tries and fails to be cool.
I'm going to tell you right now, Dan the Dickhead dies. That's one thing you'd have to look forward to if, for some reason, you watched this. And he does so without demonstrating a single redeemable trait or action through the entire film. So at least he stayed consistent. No last second recanting on his deathbed!
Alex rented this on Amazon Prime, then called me to tell me to watch it. At the time he was watching, the plane was still in the air. When I texted him after I finished watching it, he responded, 'Yeah, as soon as Ben Kingsley died I knew the budget had gone downhill.'
The breaking up of the plane does allow for a few varieties of peril, except they all boil down to needing to stay out of the water because of sharks. Eckhart, one of the flight attendants, and the stepsister are near the cockpit. The dork, the grandma, the stepbrother and another stewardess are in a submerged section of the tail, as the water slowly rises. The rest are trying to stay in the central cabin, watching the water come in from either end as the reef collapses under them. That's what coral bleaching will get ya, structurally unsound support for your crashed airplane.
Eckhart's character is running from trouble at home, trying to focus on not losing his job by strictly following the rules, and I guess takes the stepdaughter on as a surrogate child to protect in lieu of the son he can't help. Does he break the rules in some of the things he does to try and save as many as possible, and that's his arc? He stops being afraid of failing and acts? Or is it seeing how much the girl misses her family makes him decide to stop running away?
Most of the deaths aren't too surprising, though I did expect the dorky guy, who swam out of the submerged section to try and find help, would make it back to help the grandmother. They had a rocky first interaction, and she kept giving him shit afterward, calling him a "five". As in, "out of ten." Maybe six, if he cleaned up. Yeah, I bet her granddaughter was just counting the minutes until Grandma showed up to criticize her posture.
Props to that one flight attendant for hauling herself into a life raft and applying a tourniquet before passing out. That is a remarkably cool head under pressure. It did seem like we saw a lot of the women get bitten - though not always killed - while more of the guys died off-screen. Not strictly that dichotomy, but it felt like the men we did see die via shark mostly died quick. The women tended to get chomped on the calf or thigh, and maybe they could swim to safety, but maybe they got torn to shreds. Either way, a lot of panicked flailing and screaming. I don't know, just something I noticed.
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