Flight Review by Dio Rochino

      As much as we love the Back to the Future movies, it wasn’t until later in Robert Zemeckis’s career that he started defining his style.  It’s a personal opinion of mine that he creates stories that seem to simplify chaos.  One example is his award winning Forest Gump, where personal and global events encompassing four decades of history is neatly defined in the experiences of it’s main protagonist and his simple philosophy that, “Life is like a box of chocolates”.  Flight just happens to step it up a notch by reversing the formula. Taking one specific event and showing how it affects a person so complicated that only a great actor like Denzel Washington can pull it off.  Here, he brings many layers to the character of Captain Whitaker.  A pilot with a substance abuse problem who pulls off a miraculous airline landing when it starts to nose dive after it begins to fall apart in the air.  His skillful approach allowed a majority of the passengers to survive with only six fatalities.  Experts and the media maintain that he’s a hero because his quick thinking saved a lot of lives from a situation they said was hopelessly doomed.  But a criminal investigation begins to take place when evidence is presented suggesting he was intoxicated when flying the plane.

      Washington definitely gives one of the best performances of his career by showcasing someone whose excessive use of drugs and alcohol, propagated many long time mistakes that drag on his soul.  His turmoil is brilliantly depicted when his life gets see-sawed by this catastrophic event as he deals with the consequences of being  labeled a hero, his remorse over the ones who died and his guilt over the possibility that his weakness may be to blame for their deaths.  The results of which causes Whitaker to be thrown into a moral dilemma.

      There are definitely many ways to describe this film.  It can be construed simply as a morality tale or as an assessment on how popular opinion can create the notion of heroism.  It can also be viewed as a character study on the perplexities of the human condition after dealing with the responsibility of a catastrophic event.  However, while the notions behind the picture itself are gracefully chaotic, it ultimately culminates into one unexpected point and watching everything unfold is cleverly entertaining all the way to the end when the final words of the movie are spoken.