Runtime: The version I saw was 115 minutes long
Directed by: Jerry Jameson
Starring: Lee Majors, Hal Linden, Lauren Hutton, Ray Milland, Gail Strickland
From: Orgolini-Nelson Productions/Orion Television
The last airline disaster movie I plan on watching for a long while. In fact, it wasn’t until yesterday afternoon that I decided to check out Starflight, a made for TV movie (in the United States; it was released theatrically in other countries around the world, as I’ll mention in a moment) that I streamed for free via Prime. As sometimes happens, a messageboard conversation spurned what I viewed; someone asked me if I would be watching this as he was originally going to last year after doing his own watch of the Airport movies but that ultimately didn’t happen. This thought came because-according to the IMDb-at least in the Philippines and who knows where else, the movie played on the big screen as Airport ’85. While I didn’t particularly want to view something in this particular niche for the 5th night in a row, for the sake of that person on the messageboard I’ve known through that medium for years now, this is what happened.
Hypersonic transport is something that’s been no more than a theory for decades now. If supersonic travel is something that never took off, hypersonic is even now the stuff of science fiction. Can you imagine air travel at 4 thousand miles an hour, 100 thousand feet (30,480 meters) feet in the air, making a journey from California to Australia in only 2 hours? This is done in part due to rockets… imagine the fuel bills for just one flight. On its maiden voyage, of course things go awry due to various circumstances, partially due to computer error and partially due to Terry Kiser-the latter wasn’t a surprise to me. Get this: the rockets can only propel you upwards and once they’re going, you can’t change the trajectory and fly level at, say, 300,000 feet; that was never addressed and maybe I am just dumb and don’t get how that would “rip the plane apart” or what have you… it’s all silly and probably dumb, but point is that the plane is now in outer space and can’t re-enter atmosphere without frying like a hamburger on the grill.
Even excluding any possible logical fallacies with how the plane leaves Earth’s atmosphere, a big issue was for me… the boredom that occurred whenever there wasn’t any big exciting moment. At times this dragged rather badly. Thus, my opinion is that this does not rise above being average even with some campy charm present. This at least had some familiar names (Lee Majors, Hal Linden, Lauren Hutton, Ray Milland, and even Robert Englund) and a pleasant Lalo Schifrin score. At any rate, the flick is best only for the diehard disaster film fans.
No comments:
Post a Comment