Flightplan is a 2005 thriller film directed by Robert Schwentke and starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen and Sean Bean. It was released in North America on September 23, 2005. It features many plot similarities with the films Bunny Lake is Missing, in that a mother has to convince the authorities that her child is not a figment of her imagination, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

Synopsis

A variation on the locked room mystery, the movie depicts what happens after Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) boards a fictional Aalto Airlines flight from Berlin to New York with her six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston). After falling asleep and waking up about three hours into the flight, Kyle discovers her daughter is missing. She searches the plane for her daughter, but is then told that according to the passenger manifest her daughter never boarded the flight. None of her fellow passengers remember having seen her either.

A search of the plane fails to find Julia. The captain (Sean Bean) refuses to allow the cargo hold to be searched because he is afraid that the searchers could be hurt if the freight shifts because of turbulence. Both the captain and the other crew members suspect that Kyle is unhinged by her husband's recent death, and has imagined bringing her daughter aboard the aircraft. She has no boarding pass stub for her daughter, and, according to the gate at the Berlin airport, no one by her daughter's name was on the manifest. In addition, the flight attendant who took the passenger headcount never saw anyone in the seat that Julia was supposed to have occupied. Faced with the crew's increasing skepticism regarding her daughter's existence, Kyle becomes more and more desperate, frantic, and erratic in her behavior, continuing to insist that she brought her daughter on board the aircraft with her and that Julia must be somewhere inside it. Because of her increasingly erratic, panicked behavior, Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), the flight's air marshal, is ordered by the captain to guard her.

Kyle herself begins to doubt that she brought her daughter along after being told Julia had died together with her husband, but becomes confident she is not imagining things when she notices the heart Julia had earlier fingered on the window by her seat. Because Kyle is an aeronautical engineer and had helped to design the engines used on the aircraft, a fictional Elgin E-474 commercial aircraft, she is able to make use of her knowledge of the aircraft's layout and escapes to hunt for her daughter. Finding her way down to the freight deck, she even opens her late husband's casket, which she is transporting back to the United States. Carson finds her and escorts her back to her seat, leaving the casket open.

At this point it is revealed that Carson and Stephanie (an on-board flight attendant), plus a coroner in Berlin, are the true villains. Carson has devised a complicated scheme to con the airline into transferring 50 million USD to a bank account, claiming that Kyle has revealed herself to him to be a hijacker and is threatening to blow up the aircraft with explosives hidden in the un-x-rayed casket unless her demands are met. In fact, the villains have previously killed Kyle's husband and have now abducted Julia to create this situation so they can frame Kyle as the hijacker and extortionist. After the plane lands they intend to obliterate the unconscious Julia by detonating the explosives, now moved to the avionics section at the front of the plane beside the unconscious child, and leave Kyle dead on the plane with the detonator in her hand.

After making an emergency landing in Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada, the plane's passengers evacuate. As the captain leaves, Kyle stops him and asks him to leave all food carts because she wants the plane sealed. The captain then says, "I don't really have the option to say no, do I?" Kyle then stops him a second time and tells the captain that she knows she broke the law but she believes that she will find Julia. The captain is fed up and tells her that he is tired of her fake story and that her money has been wired, just like she demanded. Kyle stands there confused, but as the captain leaves she puts the pieces together and realizes that Carson is behind all of it. Carson starts to leave the plane, but Kyle, taking on her role as cast by Carson, demands that he stay on board. As soon as the plane's door is closed, Kyle knocks Carson unconscious with a fire extinguisher. Kyle handcuffs him to a rail and removes the bomb detonator from his pocket and goes in search of Julia. Carson comes to and takes a concealed gun from his leg and shoots the handcuffs, freeing himself, and goes after Kyle. She runs to the cockpit and locks herself in. While Carson is trying to convince her to open the door, she opens a hatch door to the upper level and throws a binder to fool him into thinking she is escaping. Carson moves away from the door to try to head her off when he hears the thud, and Kyle escapes to try once again to find Julia. Kyle encounters Stephanie, and walks toward her while she talks about how she couldn't believe that Stephanie would want to hurt Julia. This distracts Stephanie, and then Kyle knocks her down by a single punch. Stephanie panics and decides to abandon Carson and flee the plane.

After Carson discovers the binder that Kyle threw, he runs to check if she had found her daughter, but Kyle has found the unconscious Julia and moved her to a hiding place farther back in the aircraft. As Carson is approaching the area where he left Julia, he exclaims that it had been easy to take her and bring her into the avionics bay via a service elevator without any of the passengers noticing. Carson arrives at the front of the plane and discovers Julia gone. He turns to resume his hunt, and sees Kyle escaping through a small door with the detonator in her hand. Carson says, "What, are you going to blow all of us up?" Kyle replies calmly, "No, just you." Carson shoots as she closes the door, and she then detonates the explosives, killing Carson instantly and seriously damaging the front end of the plane.

Kyle, carrying Julia, manages to exit via a cargo door, and the FBI, flight passengers, and crew members all look at Kyle in amazement as she carries her daughter out onto the tarmac. The next morning Kyle receives apologies from the captain and the passengers look guiltily at her. A white Dodge Grand Caravan arrives to pick up Kyle and Julia. Julia then wakes up and asks, "Are we there yet?" Kyle laughs and then the Middle Eastern man whom she had confronted earlier hands her her baggage, and they are driven off.

Cast

• Jodie Foster: Kyle Pratt
• Peter Sarsgaard: Gene Carson
• Sean Bean: Captain Rich
• Kate Beahan: Stephanie
• Michael Irby: Obaid
• Assaf Cohen: Ahmed
• Erika Christensen: Fiona
• Greta Scacchi: The Therapist
• Shane Edelman: Mr. Loud
• Mary Gallagher: Mrs. Loud
• Haley Ramm: Brittany Loud
• Forrest Landis: Rhett Loud
• Fred Tungulsten: Jordan
• Jana Kolesarova: Claudia
• Brent Sexton: Elias
• Marlene Lawston: Julia
• Judith Scott: Estella
• Tonje Larsgard: Flight Attendant
• Amanda Brooks: Irene

Box office and Reaction

Flightplan grossed $89,602,378 at the box office and over $223,000,000 worldwide. It also grossed $49,270,000 on DVD rentals. The movie was met with mixed reviews from critics. It has a 38% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, in his review Roger Ebert described the film as 'a frightening thriller with an airtight plot'.

Controversy

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, with 85,000 members, called for an official boycott of the film, which they say depicts flight attendants as rude, uncaring, indifferent, and even one as a "terrorist." The boycott eventually failed.

Soundtrack

The score of the movie was released 20 September 2005 on Hollywood Records. The music is composed and conducted by James Horner, and the disc contains 8 tracks.

Tracklist:

1. "Leaving Berlin"
2. "Missing Child"
3. "The Search"
4. "So Vulnerable"
5. "Creating Panic"
6. "Opening the Casket"
7. "Carsons's Plan"
8. "Mother and Child"

Total play time 50:36 min.

Trivia

• The Goose Bay scenes were filmed far from snow, at the Mojave Spaceport in the Mojave Desert. One of the main taxiways was closed for the building of the set.
• As in many US-made films, the jurisdiction of the FBI seems to have been expanded beyond the borders of the United States. FBI Agents are seen making enquiries and arrests in Canada when the plane lands there. Additionally, those agents cite the fact that our office in Berlin has detained the morgue director. Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers, according to Canadian law, would have been the ones to detain suspects.

Additional Information

• The DVD release of this movie is one of the few protected with Sony DADC's new ARccOS copy protection.

References

External links

• Official site
• Film trailer at Apple.com