The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
Are you trying to be funny?
THE SUMMARY: An ensemble cast en route to Benghazi crashes their plane in the Sahara and must strategize and cooperate to rebuild the aircraft and escape the desert in one of the least enjoyable movies through which I’ve ever suffered. Every aspect is hideous - the writing, the acting, the production - the guy who died making this movie is lucky he never had to see it. My dad rage quit halfway through. My mom finished it, but said the director should be shot (he’s long dead). If it frustrates two mild-mannered boomers of the era, I can’t understand how Phoenix was ever considered ‘good.’ Toss this one with Blade Runner in the diaper bag of the trash pile. They should call it [Two-Plus Hours of Terribly Boring Over-Acted Dialogue Before] the [Three-Minute] Flight of the Phoenix.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER TOM N: One of Hollywood's first movies in the ‘survivor’ genre. Starring Jimmy Stewart and Richard Attenborough, it tells the tale of eight men's struggle to survive in the Sahara desert after their plane crashes and they're presumed dead.
THE BEST:
Islamophobia saves lives: Or at least some of them. Seriously speaking though, there’s a glimmer of an interesting theme here. Even in a desperate survival situation, fellow humans may actually be a bigger danger than the forces of nature. Humans have a unique capacity to save you, but they also have a unique capacity to kill you, and so any confrontation of an unknown person should be calculated carefully. The ‘coexist’ bumper sticker philosophy had its throat slit in this one, and there’s a symbol in that. An overly friendly approach to people with whom you share no values can be a suicidal gesture.
Bonus point for the mockery of Dorfmann’s makeshift ‘keffiyeh’ or whatever the headwear is called, but no bonus Wicky.
THE WORST:
Silly over-acting: The absurdity of the acting at first had me thinking this movie was some sort of survival comedy like Gilligan’s Island, but it’s not. It’s completely serious. Moran maniacally laughing at the sky, Towns becoming irrationally enraged by an electric razor, Cobb attacking Harris and the group restraining him while he screams, and more - the movie is consistently over-the-top in forced emotional outburst.
The silly tone is set immediately by the opening plane crash scene itself, which comes off as slapstick, not chaotic terror. Characters jerking their heads around to get hit in the face by oil drums and other cargo that somehow injures most of them none while they scream in agony anyway. They can engineer an improvised airplane from crash scrap - they just can’t engineer cargo security, apparently.
Ridiculous ‘dramatic’ musical effects: To emphasize the over-acting, the movie deploys horribly obnoxious instrumentals that add the same effect as the viral dramatic squirrel. The music is abrupt, it’s loud, and it’s cheesy. The over-acting that comes off as a joke is even harder to take seriously when every supposedly dramatic line is punctuated with some corny trumpet squeal. It plays as parody, not tension.
There’s a seemingly self-aware moment in the dialogue between Towns and Dorfmann that perfectly illustrates this combination of bad acting and worse musical accompaniment. Towns asks Dorfmann ‘are you trying to be funny?’ Dorfmann snaps back ‘that’s precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations!’ Then cue the ridiculous instrumental for dramatic emphasis. It’s exactly how I feel as a viewer. Are you guys serious, or are you trying to be funny? And the answer is DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
Preposterous premises: The movie is riddled with preposterous premises for a survival situation.
The magically expanding water supply: How exactly did their water last so long? Upon crash-landing, the group estimates they have 10 days’ worth of water at a dangerously low consumption rate of one pint per man per day. They then strategize for five days, theoretically consuming half their water (not even counting what Dorfmann later steals), and then in planning, Dorfmann estimates it’ll take up to 12 days to build the new Franken-plane, which of course means the men will need more water consumption.
What is originally estimated to be 10 days’ worth of water at minimum consumption somehow turns into 17 or so days’ worth with high exertion. Either the water lasted way longer than estimated, or they somehow collected more, or they finished the plane construction way ahead of schedule. But how? Unexplained, other than Dorfmann saying they could theoretically distill antifreeze for water but never actually doing it.
Not hungry enough for camel: The men are starving and dehydrated, and Towns wastes ammunition angrily shooting an Arab’s lame abandoned camel, but they don’t butcher the animal for food or other resources.
Towns giving impassioned speeches about nothing: Towns being primarily concerned with his own outrage is an insufferable recurring theme. What exactly is his survival plan? Give a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster speech about how everyone else is stupid and the real solution is sun-baking to death instead? He rejects walking to an oasis. He rejects re-building the plane. He even rejects trying to be spotted by aircraft flying overhead. He’s supposed to be the movie’s hero, but he’s just an insufferable whiner.
If he put as much work into actual problem solving as he does in impassioned fake-angry speeches about nothing, maybe the group would have been out days earlier, this movie could have been an hour shorter, and my Thanksgiving eve could have been much better spent.
Horrible pacing shows hardly any of the actual flight, and none of the landing: Worst of all, the movie’s endless focus on boring overacted interpersonal drama, rather than the engineering feat itself, relegates the actual flight time to under three minutes. The movie takes more than two hours to get to the point, and then practically skips over it anyway.
Even more frustratingly, you can’t see the crucial landing of the Phoenix. This new Franken-plane has only a ski up front for take-off and landing - it could hardly take off at all - yet it somehow lands on a steep rocky hillside off-screen and none of the nearly dead dudes hanging off the wings are ejected or even injured in any way. One of the oil workers asks ‘they ain’t gonna try to land that thing here, are they?’ Another responds ‘it sure as hell looks that way!’ No - no it doesn’t look that way. Because we don’t get a look at all.
To call this movie a serious drama yet deny the audience the satisfaction of seeing the main point of drama resolved should be criminal consumer deception. The Empire does a lot of striking back in The Empire Strikes Back. There’s plenty of termination in Terminator. Regardless of my complaints of repetition, Groundhog Day does indeed depict the day described. Yet the Phoenix… hardly flies at all.
THE RATING: 1/5 Wickies. Absolutely hated from start to finish. A movie that builds for hours to five seconds of nothing - no philosophical intrigue, no moral dilemma, not even an explanation for how a bunch of nearly dead guys somehow hung on to a Franken-plane crash-landing on a hillside. It’s a presentation that demands to be taken seriously despite its absurdity, yet delivers no such respect itself.
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NEXT WEEK: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
AFTER THAT? YOU PICK - VOTE! December’s Christmas movie list comes from long-time listener and helpful show contributor Michael Schlecht (follow him on Twitter). In the event that his list is rejected, we will randomly select a movie from IMDb’s top-rated Christmas movie list.
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