Flightplan (2005)

A claustrophobic, Hitchcockian thriller. A bereaved woman and her daughter are flying home from Berlin to America. At 30,000 feet the child vanishes and nobody admits she was ever on that plane.

Director:

Robert Schwentke

Writers:

Peter A. Dowling, Billy Ray

Stars:

Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean

1 win & 3 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Jodie Foster	...	Kyle Pratt
Peter Sarsgaard	...	Carson
Sean Bean	...	Captain Rich
Kate Beahan	...	Stephanie
Michael Irby	...	Obaid
Assaf Cohen	...	Ahmed
Erika Christensen	...	Fiona
Shane Edelman	...	Mr. Loud
Mary Gallagher	...	Mrs. Loud
Haley Ramm	...	Brittany Loud
Forrest Landis	...	Rhett Loud
Jana Kolesárová	...	Claudia
Brent Sexton	...	Elias
Marlene Lawston	...	Julia
Judith Scott	...	Estella

Storyline

The husband of aviation engineer Kyle Pratt has just died in Berlin. Now she is flying back to New York with his coffin and their six-year-old daughter Julia. Three hours into the flight Kyle awakens to find that Julia is gone! It's a big double-decker plane, so very concerned mother has a lot of territory to cover in order to find her daughter. But as Kyle fights to discern the truth, she takes matters into her own hands.

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Plot Keywords:

flight attendant | apartment | search | captain | fight | 

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Taglines:

If Someone Took Everything You Live For... How Far Would You Go To Get It Back?

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Genres:

Drama | Mystery | Thriller

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for violence and some intense plot material

Details

Official Sites:

Buena Vista Home Entertainment [us] Official DVD site [de]

Country:

USA

Language:

English French German Arabic Italian Japanese

Release Date:

23 September 2005 (USA)

Also Known As:

Plan de vuelo

Filming Locations:

Berlin, Germany

Box Office

Budget:

$55,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

£1,694,350 (UK) (25 November 2005)

Gross:

$89,706,988 (USA) (3 March 2006)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Touchstone Pictures, Imagine Entertainment

Technical Specs

Runtime:

98 min

Sound Mix:

DTS Dolby Digital SDDS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The 35mm prints of this film come from a digital intermediate that has been digitally grain reduced. As a result there are digital grain reduction artifacts visible on all prints.

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Goofs

When Kyle is banging on the captain's door to speak to him she has her boarding pass in her right hand. Two shots later her hand is empty.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Mortuary Director: [in German, subtitled] Would you like a moment of privacy before the casket is sealed?
Kyle: [hesitantly] Okay.

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Crazy Credits

The end credits roll over a blue wire frame animation of the airliner used in the movie.

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Connections

Referenced in The Dialogue: An Interview with Screenwriter Billy Ray (2007)

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Soundtracks

"Silent Poet"
Written & Performed by Rupert Pope (as Ru Pope)
Courtesy of Extreme Production Music USA

User Reviews

A plot stretched wafer thin to provide a stage for good acting

Feature films invite us to defy reality, believe a fiction, suspend disbelief. The actor has to make the unreal, real. Jodie Foster has done this in the past with notable success and strings of awards – and often chosen stories that parallel our unwillingness to accept: a rape victim that no-one believed, a paranoid in a locked room that had every reason to be afraid, a scientist that finds proof of aliens. In Flightplan she goes one further – a mother who loses her daughter during a transatlantic flight and whom no-one (including, most of the time, the audience) believes.

Aircraft engineer Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is devastated by the sudden death of her husband. She flies his body back to New York on a state-of-the-art airliner which she designed. Dozing off for a few minutes on the plane, she awakes to find her six year old daughter is missing. Frantic searches ensue as the mounting evidence suggests the daughter was never on board.

Flightplan combines a taut psychological thriller with a deepening mystery and tremendous emotional punch. But does the denouement justify the storyline, the switching positions we are forced to adopt about Kyle's sanity and the existence of her daughter? Or is it simply a story that cashes in on current passenger apprehension over hijacking and Foster's considerable acting talent? Foster is at her best, an outraged, highly intelligent woman with a mother's bottled up and barely contained grief providing simmering emotional force.

It is a remarkable testament to Foster's talent that she can carry such an unlikely story. She imbues the confined space of an aircraft with an energy that doesn't wilt for a moment and ensures our attention never flags. Ably assisted by Sean Bean as the Captain, wanting to give her every benefit of doubt but increasingly forced to accept the evidence of his own eyes, and Air Marshall Peter Sarsgaard who plays an interesting yet inscrutable character, we are mesmerised by Kyle Pratt and our own difficulty in knowing whether to believe her. Whether the story was worthy of such talent is less clear. As the pieces unravel we are presented with a bewildering complexity of background information which, without Foster to carry it or Hitchcockian logic to prove it, we are tempted to dismiss with Flightplan as overambitious. As an exercise in powerful acting that stands up as a Saturday night thriller, Flightplan delivers in Club Class, but as the sum of its parts it is as convoluted and full of wishful thinking as someone trying to stretch out in Economy.