Though many people may not be aware of this, and I know I sure wasn't, this is actually a remake of a 40-year old James Stewart / Richard Attenborough flick. Gosh eh. I wonder what was going through the studio head's mind when someone piped up with 'hey, lets remake that movie no one has heard of'. They can't honestly have presumed that it would be a scorching moneymaker, or would win any awards or critical acclaim. It took barely half the $45 million it cost to make in the US, and even with an optimistic foreign take would have been highly unlikely to have broken even. How exactly it cost that much to make in the first place I can't even begin to imagine, there's only a few principle characters and no one who would command more than a million or so in take-home pay. So, what was the point eh?
Well the plot itself is actually rather interesting, in a simplistic way of course. After crashing in the desert a motley group of oilrig workers and pilots, aided by a mysterious and aloof plane designer, attempt to build another plane out of the wreckage and fly it home before they all die of exposure and thirst. That's pretty much it. Cue much cocking-up, infighting and getting lost in all the sand. While we're all obviously supposed to be on the edge of our seats as our heroes overcome the various obstacles in their way, you can't help but think it's all a bit contrived and, well, lazy. People get lost in the desert and die; their fuel supply explodes without much of a clue as to why, and they constantly worry about the amount of water they have left. A group of nomadic scavangers are briefly interposed to produce another threat to the group but are hardly used at all. If they hadn't have been included it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
In general this is yet another example of a studio failing utterly to produce a truly interesting and worthwhile movie that actually has any appeal. This, at best, could have been a half-decent TV movie, not a theatrical feature. One has to wonder at the intelligence of people who greenlight so obviously unnecessary a project. The film's not awful, its major problem is simply that if it hadn't have been made no one would have cared. If anything this review is aimed squarely at the dunces who ever believed they could turn a tidy profit from it. The only person who has won is Dennis Quaid, who at 50 gets yet another chance to show off the fact that he's in superb shape for a man his age. Then again, given the movies he has graced us with of late physical fitness is clearly not that important a factor. I'm going to stop beating myself up at the gym. |
