Day 26 - Altitude (2010)
Platform:
Borrowed from OverDrive.
Quote:
“We’ve been going down for twenty minutes. Tell me you’re not thinking the same thing I am [...] Where the hell’s the ground?”
Synopsis:
A group of friends is flying to a concert in a small private plane. While flying through a storm, they become lost as a creature of epic proportions stalks them through the sky.
Review:
Throughout most of this film, I couldn’t help singing in my head, “Cthulu in the sky keep on turning! I don’t know where I’ll be tomorroooooowww!” That’s the really basic premise, as you can tell by the cover. I was with this movie for a really long time despite one of the characters, Sal. I’ll talk more about him later. The setup of the film opens in the past as our main character, Sara is remembering the plane crash where her mom died. In spite of this, Sara is determined to be a pilot herself. I like the character they develop for Sara as a strong, independent woman. And honestly, for the most part, she never deviates from that. Sara owns her past by deciding to literally fly in the face of the thing that took her mother from her. Sara is going off to college, and she’s ready to leave everything behind and start her life anew. The plot really kicks off when she and her friends gather at the airfield to launch off on a final trip to a concert before going off to college. They set up some great character dynamics, as you have Sara, her friends Mel and Cory, and her pseudo boyfriend Bruce, with who she is trying to have one last adventure before they separate when she goes off to college. Bruce though is not quite ready to let Sara just walk out of his life, so despite having a major fear of flying, he’s agreed to go on the trip to try to win Sara over and convince her that they can make the relationship work. In addition to these characters, we have Mel’s boyfriend Sal. More on him later, but the major point here is that Cory is actually in love with Mel, and there’s a lot of tension in the love triangle with those three. The character relationships are all really working in this first part, despite my extreme irritation with Sal. Trouble comes, though, when they have to fly through a storm and get stuck climbing up at a steady pace before finally getting control back. While they are stuck in the storm though, a tentacled creature keeps messing with the plane, occasionally snagging one of the passengers. The confined space of the small plane is an excellent setting, and the tension of being trapped in the storm is a good parallel for the tension that’s growing among the group of “friends” although this film does fall prey to a horror trope of putting various teens together as a group of friends even though it seems unlikely that they would actually be such a tight group of friends in real life.
Ok, now this film works really well for the first three-fourths of the movie. This is in spite of the Sal character driving me absolutely nuts. I know way too many kids like this. He’s a complete tool who does the stupidest stuff you can imagine, all the while thinking he’s just the coolest guy on the face of the earth. When the plane goes to take off, he’s just howling and yelling THE ENTIRE TIME!!! Just constant noise for no reason. Everyone else is a little nervous, though Bruce is absolutely petrified, and then you have this asshat whooping it up and getting in everyone’s face. Throughout the film, he’s constantly just proving to be a bigger and bigger jerk. At one point, Sara is giving Bruce a parting graduation present which is a very rare comic book because Bruce is a collector. For absolutely no reason other than he’s annoyed that Bruce is absolutely terrified of being in the air, Sal snatches the comic from him and then rips out a page slowly while saying in a really childish mocking voice, “Oh no, what’s happening? Oh no, it’s ripping.” And everyone just sits back and watches him do this. No one says a thing to him. Even Sara, who just dropped some serious cash on this collector’s piece as a parting gift for the guy she’s essentially dumping. Sal is infuriating.
However, it’s in the final moments of the film that everything really unravels. I won’t go into spoilers for this one, because some people might find it a decent watch despite the terrible ending. Some people might even like the horrible ending. For me though, the wild twist just completely ruins the good thing they had going. Especially when they really don’t give ANY explanation for why the ending happens the way that it does. I really want to go into this one because it’s so infuriatingly stupid. So if anyone does watch this one and they want to discuss it with me, let me know. Ultimately, I’m going to recommend this film because the majority of this film really works well.
Movie Count:
New = 17
Total = 26
OverDrive Breakdown: OverDrive is a digital platform that you can use to borrow ebooks, audiobooks, comics, graphic novels, and movies. Unlike Hoopla, you can't download videos. They must be streamed. Also, you don't have the casting option. But both Hoopla and OverDrive can be accessed via web browser so you can watch on your computers. Another drawback is that you don't have unlimited access to videos, so if someone else has it borrowed, you do have to place a hold and wait for them to either return the material or for their loan to time out. Plus sides are the ease of borrowing. You have a set number of titles of any format (book, audio, video, etc.) that you can borrow from at any point in time (my library is set at ten), but once you return a title, you get that borrow back. So, unlike Hoopla, you don't have to wait for the next month to start borrowing again. Also, even if you have to place a hold, the longest loan period on a video is seven days, and then most videos expire 48 hours after you start watching, so the turnaround time is very quick. OverDrive will also email you notifications when your hold is ready.
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