Le survivant d'un monde parallèle

Robert Powell and Jenny Agutter star in this Australian production of a pilot and a medium who have need of each other after an air crash.

Powell was the pilot of an airliner which crashed on coming in for a landing at an airport. Mysteriously he was the only survivor and he survived with barely a scratch, but with retrograde amnesia, he cannot remember any of the details of the crash.

Agutter is a psychic who is having a bad time seeing visions of what happened and apparently communicating with those who died. What they discover about the crash the story for the rest of the film.

This film marks the farewell appearance of Joseph Cotten who has a small role as a priest. Soon afterwards this most classy of leading men from the golden days of Hollywood suffered a stroke and was forcibly retired from the cinema.

It's not a bad film, Survivor, but it plays like a blown up version of an episode of the TV series One Step Beyond. It might be worth a look if that's how your tastes run.

"The Survivor" is a bizarre, incomprehensible attempt at a horror story that barely registers as that or as anything at all.

The bits that one assumes are meant to be scary are merely confusing and come out of nowhere. The soundtrack signals to you that you're supposed to be scared, pummelling you with frantic music, but this is merely irritating since you can't understand what, if anything, you are supposed to be scared by.

The plot is actually fairly simple. So why is it so confusing? It's about a pilot who survives a plane crash that kills everyone else on board. He is visited by some kind of clairvoyant or something, played by Jenny Agutter, who is about as mystical in this role as the CEO of Wendy's was when he appeared in that training video (Youtube it). Her role in the plot is obvious on paper (how else is the movie going to get the supernatural bent going?), but when handled this badly, it becomes confusing and you wonder what she is there for.

The ending, I admit, was clever. It's just that everything that led up to it was so bad that it was completely wasted, like the rest of the movie was.

In 2000, Final Destination saw Death catching up with a group of passengers who narrowly avoid being killed in an air disaster. In 1984, Sole Survivor saw the only survivor of a plane crash being haunted by the ghosts of the dead. And four years before that, The Survivor centred on a pilot who miraculously walks from the wreckage of his downed passenger plane, only to be menaced by the spirits of those who weren't so lucky. Each successive film was inspired by the previous one, with The Survivor being based on a James Herbert novel. Rather surprisingly, the first film is the weakest of the three versions, having neither the creepy atmosphere of Sole Survivor, nor the imaginatively gory death scenes of Final Destination.

The film stars Robert Powell, whose face and curly hair upsets me; it also features Jenny Agutter, who makes me feel all funny in a good way. Unfortunately, the lovely Jenny really doesn't make up for Powell's presence (I'm still angry at having wasted time watching him in Harlequin, made the previous year), or for the fact that the film becomes incredibly slow and very boring once the airplane crash is over. The Survivor meanders aimlessly for an hour and a half, culminating with a twist ending that is more than a tad confusing: has Powell's character been dead the whole time? Have the dead returned to claim the only survivor? Is Jenny Agutter's character a ghost as well? I don't really have the answers, and I doubt you will either.

NB. The name of Powell's character, David Keller, is remarkably similar to David Kessler, the name of the protagonist in Agutter's next film, An American Werewolf in London. It doesn't end well for either man.

Produced by the South Australian Film Corporation and filmed on location in Adelaide, The Survivor in many ways foretells the Lockerbie disaster many years before that tragic event. The film was a huge commitment at the time - a full scale 747 was made at a local car manufacturing plant and transported to the 'crash site'. I remember visiting the set after the shoot - it was still littered with suitcases, seats, clothes and the engines were windmilling in the breeze. The haunting music makes the film, similar to Picnic At Hanging Rock, the actors believable, the cinematography honest and the storyline compelling if a little slow. Take it for what was cutting edge at the time for a small film studio and you have an enjoyable slightly disturbing thriller. Take time and watch other productions by the SAFC - they're a refreshing change from the big studios mass produced entertainment.

This little known movie should be seen by anyone who thinks Aussie films are all mindless travelogues with idiotic characters.

After a catastrophic plane crash, rescuers are surprised to see the pilot walking unhurt from the twisted, burning wreckage. The pilot (Robert Powell) can offer no explanation as to how he survived the explosion that killed every other person on the plane. The tension mounts when the investigation proves that the crash was so severe that the pilot could not have POSSIBLY survived no matter where he was on the plane, and yet there he is.

This is a well-crafted paranormal drama, with each new revelation concerning the crash leading you deeper into intrigue.

Also, it was made 19 years before Unbreakable, which has some very similar plot elements.