After nearly a decade of experimentation with motion-capture animation, director Robert Zemeckis returned to live action filmmaking last fall with Flight, starring Denzel Washington. The film tells the story of commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker, who must confront his demons after crash landing a airliner while drunk on vodka and high on cocaine. (You can read Neil Morris’ full review here.)
Flight is a fascinating piece of filmmaking and a kind of stealthy movie business maneuver. The marketing and advance trailers for Flight highlighted the film’s boffo action sequence — the plane crash — and the almost gimmicky angle of the airline pilot that shows up for work drunk. This is a news story we seem to see about once a month these days.
But as anyone who has seen the film knows, Flight is a much more complicated machine. The spectacular plane crash proves to be a kind of narrative feint concealing a harrowing addiction drama and character study. It’s one of the strangest and best screenplays to come along in a long, long while. (It a nominee for this year’s Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.)
Anyone interested in looking under the hood of this remarkable film will want to check out the superior bonus materials included on the home video release of Flight, new to DVD and Blu-ray this week.
