Le vol du Phoenix

An oil rig in the Mongolian Gobi Desert is getting shut down. Captain Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid) and co-pilot A.J. (Tyrese Gibson) are flying Kelly Johnson (Miranda Otto), her crew and the equipment back to Beijing. Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi) is a mysterious stranger who catches a ride. The plane crashes in a sand storm. Men die and supplies dwindle. There's no way to walk out. There is unlikely to be any search parties. Aircraft designer Elliot has an idea to build a new aircraft out of the wreckage but Towns opposes it.

It's a remake of the 1965 movie. The premise has always been a bit ridiculous. The problem is that it's played for real. The unlikely scenario keeps diminishing the excitement. There are a few good actors and there is a bit of good tension among the group. I don't like Gibson and a little conflicted about Ribisi. The movie is generally forgettable.

An instantly forgettable - a film that rewards no one with renewed viewings. I got the impression no one cared about this film - certainly not the actors and all the tech stuff was thrown away . So how do you build a plane out of a crashed one ? That bit was skimped over but if so, where was the film's plot ? There was no love interest, no real threat (except at the end when the 'Nomads' lined up on a horizon in the way I think I have seen in many Westerns). Everyone phoned in a performance on this movie and it should have been scrapped on the runway.

I trust everyone will be tempted to see the original 1965 film.

This version of "Flight of the Phoenix" was released at the end of 2004 and is a modern take on the 1965 film with Jimmy Stewart.

THE PLOT: A group of mostly oil workers crash land in the Gobi Desert where being found by a search party is unlikely. One of the passengers turns out to be an airplane designer who insists that they can create a new plane with the workable parts of the wreckage. Although an outlandish idea, it may be their only legitimate chance at survival.

The plot is exactly the same as the original version with a few notable differences: It takes place about 40 years later; it includes a woman (Miranda Otto); it features a more racially mixed cast; and it takes place in the Gobi Desert rather than the Libyan Desert (although it was shot in Namibia, while the original was filmed in the deserts of SE California).

I'm not one of those people who hates the very idea of remakes. I'm open to filmmakers taking a heralded classic and modernizing it, like the excellent remake of "The Parent Trap." That's what we get with this remake of "Flight of the Phoenix," except that it's not excellent. But it's not bad either.

Although there are some new touches that are as good or even superior to the original (Like Liddle's powerful line to Towns in the debris field, as well as the confrontation with the Mongols sequence), this modernization ultimately pales in the shadow of the original. Why? There's less focus on character development and therefore the movie has less interesting characters. Instead the filmmakers opt for scenes that might maintain the attention of those with ADHD, like an explosion scene, a lightning storm sequence and a dubious attack by the Mongol smugglers at the very end (shouldn't they have attacked while they were pulling the aircraft? Or earlier?). But the biggest negative is that the movie just lacks the brilliant dramatic flow of the original.

The film runs 113 minutes.

FINAL WORD: This would be a better film for anyone who hasn't seen the original, but if you've seen the '65 version it's just so mediocre by comparison. Still, it's worth checking out if, like me, you love survival films. And it is interesting to see a different take on the same basic story.

GRADE: C

Before the TV series Lost made being stranded after a plane goes down hip, there was the Flight of the Phoenix. This is a modern remake of the 1965 original, and we follow a group of misfits who must play on one another's strength, and one man's ability to think out of the box, in order to make it out alive.

Dennis Quaid plays cocky pilot Frank Towns, who together with his co-pilot AJ (played by Tyrese Gibson), are tasked to fly a group of oil-riggers out of their just-closed outpost in the Gobi desert. Led by a lady called Kelly (Miranda Otto), this group of men seemed close to that ensemble lined up in Armageddon.

On a routine flight out of the desert, they encounter a humongous sandstorm, which Towns underestimates, and ended up with a broken plane in the middle of the desert. Well, you should know the rest, it's the usual distrust turned into camaraderie building opportunity, as the troupe gathers to build a new plane (hence called the Phoenix) by salvaging parts from the rubble. Sandstorms, electrical storms, and nasty nomads stand in their way, and it's kinda fun to see how our survivors overcome these challenges on their road to freedom.

Perhaps what appealed to me was how this film was shot. My eyes were constantly glued at how it made the desert so enchantingly sexy. The special effects too were great, from the sandstorm, to the usage of effects to bring out the whole "what-ifs" scenario. Slow motion techniques were used sparingly, but nonetheless effectively.

And I just got to raved about the music. You wouldn't think that Outkast's Hey Ya would make it to the film, but it did. But what takes the cake is the awesome use of Massive Attack's Angel during the entire scene when the group approaches a gang of nomads. Wow. I dig that song, and to witnessed it being used in that sequence, totally blows me away.

Don't expect too much from the plot, as it's as simple as it can be, with of course, some plot holes thrown in. Questions like food and water will ring throughout the movie, but I suppose one can gloss over the fine details and accept that they had enough to tide them through.

The Code 1 DVD contains deleted and extended scenes, and one almost 45 minute long making-of documentary titled the "Phoenix Diaries". It's one extremely detailed look at the making of the movie, without using too many footage from the final product.

I'm not saying that I didn't get caught up in this a bit, but then I searched my memory for the original, which cam out when I was pretty young. It starred Jimmy Stewart, who was a good deal more balanced than Dennis Quaid. There is nothing new here, other than a Mongol hoard and Mongolia itself. The point, of course, is to build a plane from carcass of the older, larger one. I think what was missing was true characterization. While everyone seemed to wear their emotions on their sleeves, they were like worker ants with little visible personality. At the beginning, the captain would rather let everyone die than put forth some effort. The in-fighting seems really strained. The characters who wander off don't seem to have reason other than it's the right thing to do. There is an ugly scene with a nomadic tribe. As if the process of getting out of the desert wasn't bad enough. There is also a problem with wear and tear on the principles involved. They seem to stay pretty healthy despite their hard work and the hopeless nature of their predicament. I'm not saying it's a bad movie. It's just not different enough or well acted enough to make it any better than the first.