Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash

The Skynyrd story needs to be told, but it deserves someone who can do it properly. There are some good documentaries about Skynyrd and I want to see a good feature film about them but unfortunately this one fell flat. This band was the farthest thing from an after school special but ultimately this feels like a lifetime special. Cameron Crowe would be my choice to make a film on Skynyrd.

I thought after exposing the inaccuracies in "If I Leave Here Tomorrow," where out of 96 minutes the six minutes that was about Cassie & Steve Gaines was never fact checked about the date, location, venue where Steve Gaines auditioned even who made the call to turn Steve's guitar up in the mix. If those facts are blown over what other facts stated in the movie can you believe to be accurate? That movie was reviewed as a documentary. It wasn't ! That movie and this movie are tales told by people who's brains experienced a plane crash after being in a drug induced environment. And should we be surprised when they get it wrong. You can believe LS & MCA about as far as you can throw them.

It hurts to write this, it hurts to kick Artimus, but this is dreadful. I just hope he got a nice earner out of it because the movie has no merit whatsoever and helping Artimus stay afloat is the only positive I can glean from it. In the first scene Artie (or the actor playing him) is playing drums and his wife alerts him - "Ronnie Van Zant is on the phone!" "From Lynyrd Skynyrd?" he replies. No, your DENTIST Ronnie Van Zant! It starts as it means to go on. Artie bookends the movie, giving his band APB a plug at the end, and boy, does he inhabit the movie in between. He's an expert pilot ("Four years in the marines!"), he can do emergency surgery, he can struggle for miles with serious injuries (I'm happy to say he suffered torn cartilage in his chest and nothing more serious in the crash) then help with the rescue effort blitzing anyone who stands between him and his bandmates (at the crash site and at the hospital). It's all about him! When I heard the band launch into (a really poor version of) Call me the Breeze early on, I thought good, stories of no access to the music were untrue. Then I found that that brief blast of music was all there was - it being a cover version they were allowed to play it. For this reason Skynyrd opened the show with it (!)at one of those totally unrealistic movie gigs - you know, social distancing where a mosh pit should be, Skynyrd at their peak playing a stage the size of a cigarette packet. As a means of making life easier for Artimus, great - as a movie, virtually worthless.

I was with RVZ for many years, even before Artimus. This is not in the spirit of RVZ or the band as a whole. I Love Artimus just as much as I Love RVZ and all members of the band and this breaks my heart. I am not sure what happened in the production of this film but it is in the wrong spirit of things. I knew RVZ so well I believe that I could have played his part and done it right. There is so much wrong with this film I just can't continue. Artimus, I know you are a very brilliant man. What went wrong here. Ask yourself in your heart, would Ronnie approve of this film, or would he have done it his way? Because I know for a fact anything that he was involved in was done his way or not at all. No spoilers here.

Being a lifelong Skynyrd fan, I so wanted to like this movie, but it was mostly dreadful. Very centered around Artimus being the good guy, while painting Ronnie in a fairly poor light for most of the film. The only other band member that gets much of a look in is Cassie Gaines. The rest of the band are just a supporting cast. The pilots are made out to be a pair of incompetant buffoons, ejecting fuel instead of redirecting it, not filling the fuel tanks up completely etc. Plus all of their ridiculously naive conversations must be supposition, as both perished in the crash. The acting is, without exception, terrible. Typical dialogue, Artimus, "I was an aviation sergeant in the marines for four years, what's going on with that fuel gauge, it's showing empty..Jeez man, it sounds like the right engine is about to blow." Funny he didn't exercise that knowledge after the previous flight when flames were coming out the engine. The fatal crash itself is an overdrawn, over melodramatic segment, with music more suited to a soap opera. Of course after the crash it's all about Artimus again, being the hero of the day. He single handedly realises the plane is in trouble, discovers all the bodies, then helps to rescue some of them. The most excruciating scene lasts for close to ten minutes, where Artimus clambers over hills and through the undergrowth and across rivers to go and find help. The last 30 minutes is basically Artimus' recovery and post crash trauma. In his ego centric world there is no mention of the other surviving members, or any real acknowledgement of those who died. Pitiful. Lost all respect for the guy after watching this.