Flight Plan

Fifteen minutes after I walked into the theater to watch United 93, I walked out.

But it's not for the reasons you're thinking.

Let's step back and see what you'd be thinking anyway. Forget the movie. What's the first reason anyone walks away from a film? It sucks so bad or is so completely offensive or sickening that you walk out. Most people will sit through a bad movie. We've all seen plenty. It's easier to walk out of a film that you can't stand for one reason or another.

There are people who won't sit through horror films or blood splatter fests because the visceral image of people being killed or maimed or bloodied is too much. To be honest, that's why I don't go see horror films either. I knew someone who couldn't deal with blood if it were real or stylized. For example, before Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson directed Dead Alive (also called Braindead) which is meant to be humorous, even as it spatter fakish blood all over. I knew a friend who bailed because of this. She couldn't take all that blood, even as it was fake.

Then, there are films like Irreversible, with its nine minute rape scene stuck right in the middle, that tends to drive viewers away, who feel that they are somehow participating in the rape by being a bystander who can do nothing about it.

I can deal with both. I can watch splatter-fests, even if it's not my favorite kind of film. I can deal with tough films like Irreversible.

I suppose there are other reasons to walk out on a film. It hits phobias that you can't deal with. It deals with emotional trauma you're not ready for.

However, I read the reviews to United 93 and I had heard it was tastefully done.

Living in the DC area, you'd think I should have been more sensitive to the attack on the Pentagon, and yet, there was hardly any footage of it. For some reason, you just don't see much. So despite the proximity of this event, the attack on the twin towers resonates that much more, because there was footage that was repeated over and over and over again.

Still, I don't live in New York City. I didn't pass by the twin towers. I don't know people who worked there. I wouldn't have had the same kind of emotions as the people in New York City.

So emotionally, I would have been fine to watch it, I imagine.

That eliminates most reason why anyone would walk out of a movie. Short of a wife giving birth, a fire in the theater, the movie disintegrating, an emergency call, etc. what would make me walk out?

Handheld camerawork.

I don't know who's brilliant idea it was to use handheld camerawork. It's been the practice of directors to do handheld work with a quivering hold to give a sense of "you are there" as if it were filmed by an epileptic. This shaking affects few people. Some never notice it at all.

For a few moments, I was fine. Still, it usually takes about fifteen minutes of this before nausea sets in, and I was feeling some of the effects. Had I decided to brave it out, I would have been miserable in another fifteen minutes. Coincidentally, Peter Jackson movies do that to me too. Jackson likes to have his camera dive, he likes to swirl his camera very fast. The motion isn't like handheld, but its effect is the same.

I can generally watch these films on the small screen. They take up far less of my peripheral vision, and so they affect me much less.

Still, this would have been a perfectly watchable film had the director simply decided to keep the camera still, and not film it as if he were on a pogo stick. It's good that most films don't use this much, or I'd be unable to watch most films.

It's too bad, because I think this would have been a film worth watching. I've wondered what it must have been like to be aboard. I wouldn't obviously want to have been aboard, but the details of what happened are something of a mystery to me.

Some people aren't ready to deal with the emotional stress of a plane being taken over and knowing that death is likely imminent. Yet, think of a film like Titanic. How many people watch the film and think about the disaster itself? How it must have felt to go down with a sinking ship?

And unlike United 93, where the events leading up to the end probably occurred in the first hour of flight, the Titanic took some two hours or so to sink. And some of the people could be saved, while many could not. Still, the Titanic didn't evoke those feelings because it was a love story, and thus a melodrama. The life and death of Jack is something of a movie plot element. Emotional perhaps, but not realistic.

Maybe it's the documentary like approach that convinces you that you could have been any of the people aboard, whereas the Titanic was set a hundred years ago, and most people know that modern ocean liners are relatively safe. Even the sinking of the Titanic lead to better designs for ships to make it less likely to sink. (It's ironic that trying to miss the iceberg likely sank the Titanic. Had it simply crashed headlong into the iceberg, the passengers would have had a huge jolt, but the ship would like have stayed afloat. It was because it tore a gash along the side that the ship sank.)

I will say, of the few minutes I watched, there were all these small cues to make you realize this is a film, and not a documentary, such as how the terrorists don't look nearly as anonymous as everyone else, how they show the airplane being fueled up, how the boxcutters were set up.

So I walked out, but the thing was, were it not for a directorial decision---to use handheld camerawork---I might have walked out for a different reason.

Or not.