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DVD Flight of the Phoenix (Widescreen Edition)
As superfluous remakes go, Flight of the Phoenix could've been better, and could've been worse. It's a passable popcorn adventure, especially for those unfamiliar with the 1965 original, which starred James Stewart, made headlines for the crash-landing death of stunt-pilot Paul Mantz, and now stands as a minor classic of its era. This flashy remake stars Dennis Quaid in Stewart's role, adds a woman to the list of plane-crash survivors, and showcases Giovanni Ribisi, who gives a cleverly eccentric performance as the model-airplane designer who proposes to rebuild a crashed cargo plane into a single-engine escape from certain death in the remote Gobi desert. Both films are essentially identical, but this remake is somehow less believable (due to shortcuts in a haphazardly written screenplay) and much more spectacular, owing to the advantage of impressive special effects. Otherwise it's a routine dose of survivalist entertainment from the director of Behind Enemy Lines, never convincing enough to be genuinely compelling, but certainly never boring. --Jeff Shannon
Review(s): DVD Flight of the Phoenix (Widescreen Edition)
A dry oil well at 6,000 ft above sea level?! That can't be!
Stop complaining about wasting two hours of your life! You missed the warning about what lay ahead in the very opening scene: Gobi desert. Mongolia. Oil exploration. An international team of "oilmen" and a woman are frustrated at not finding oil in what basically is a huge flat mountain. Lives are broken. Careers are ruined.
Dear script writer: Oil in sand Ok in Saudi Arabia. Oil and sand no go in Mongolia.
I did love the toy plane designer fella pull an R2D2 in the broken rudder incident, though. DO fast forward to the scene. It's at the very end of the movie.
This movie is a joke!!!
Well, it's a movie so it wants us to believe that with whatever tools they had, they can design, build and sucessfully fly what looked like an airplane... LOL... Hhhhmmmm...
painfully bad, especially if you're a pilot or engineer
The characters are all angry with each other, for no obvious reason, even before they manage to crash their airplane. If you know how to fly an airplane you will be amazed at how little effort the screenwriters put into making the cause of the crash plausible. The engineer who saves their butts by figuring out how to make a new airplane out of the remaining parts is cartoonishly unlikable.
[Note to flying nerds: At the end of the movie they are trying to get off the ground while being chased by angry Mongols on horseback. The horses are able to run nearly as fast as the plane, which is a rather small remnant of the C-119. So we're asked to believe that the plane, despite its Wright R-3350 engine (over 2000 horsepower), can't go faster than a horse and can't fly even in ground effect. Yet after it runs off the edge of the cliff it somehow manages to fly and develop a good climb rate in free air.]
The Namibian desert looks good, I will say that.
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