Flight 42, Retour vers l'enfer

Full disclosure. I like airplanes going back in time, ie 'The odyssey of Flight 33.' Well done for low, low budget. No spoilers here. It deserves some praise.

This movie has been available for some time through a couple of streaming channels, and was always reluctant to watch it, just the premise and title screamed "bad B movie". Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised, it was by no means a great movie, but it kept me interested enough to finish it and it wasn't completely insulting to one's intelligence. The real payoff was the very ending if the movie. It's not often that even a high budget movie surprises me, but this movie had a very nice surprise at the end that made the whole movie worth watching.

People need to cut this movie a bit of slack. It's just meant to be fun. It's not meant to be anything else. Sure the history is bizarre. That's even pointed out in the movie, as they discuss the Battle of Dunkirk - in this movie it didn't turn out the way it actually turned out. So, somehow, history is a little bit different, which perhaps helps to explain a lot of what seem to be historical inaccuracies. They're not inaccurate. The timeline is just a little bit different. Folks need to stop fixating on that and accept the movie as sheer entertainment. From that perspective it worked quite well.

International Airlines Flight 42 from Dulles to Heathrow encounters a weird storm over the Atlantic, and when passing through it also somehow goes back in time - emerging over the French coast during a German bombing raid in 1940. Nobody knows how it happened, and it takes a while for everyone to be convinced that it has happened - but however it happened, it happened, and it's enjoyable enough to watch as the crew and passengers come to terms with their situation and try to develop a plan to get out of it alive.

It's a low budget, sci-fi movie about time travel featuring a largely little known cast. You have to know that going in to it and set your expectations accordingly. I think the rating this movie gets here (4.4 at the time of writing) is ridiculously low. I'm going to give it an 8 - not because it's a great movie - but because in spite of its limitations it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish. It's fun and it entertains. I had no trouble watching it from beginning to end - which is more than I can say for a lot of big budget movies with mega-stars.

There will be a lot of reviews pointing out the historical inaccuracies and errors made within the film, and I won't refute that. When viewing for the first time I expected these faults in the writing and took them into account. It isn't the worst movie of all time, nor is it the best. The acting is sketchy and the graphics are average at best, but that's not what this flick is for. Of course there are things wrong with it, but that's the point. The film wasn't made for the purpose of historical accuracy, but as a simple sci-fi, action picture that would provide 90 minutes of entertainment. But when you see a description of a passenger aircraft from 2015 travelling through time to 1940, what did you honestly expect? Not a horrible movie, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes basic action and a bit of corny drama.

It was a low budget movie with loads of goofs and factual rubbish but, nonetheless I did enjoy it. If anyone has ever seen The Final Countdown (1980), the plot is very similar to that but in an aeroplane, not a battleship.

Nice final scene too. Made my spine tingle a little bit !