Flight

"Some miracles are not what they seem."

2012 2h 18m EN

👍

6.9

SOLID

★6.9TMDB · 6,640

Drama

Synopsis

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Commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker has a problem with drugs and alcohol, though so far he's managed to complete his flights safely. His luck runs out when a disastrous mechanical malfunction sends his plane hurtling toward the ground. Whip pulls off a miraculous crash-landing that results in only six lives lost. Shaken to the core, Whip vows to get sober -- but when the crash investigation exposes his addiction, he finds himself in an even worse situation.

“Some miracles are not what they seem.”

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Cast

Denzel Washington
Whip Whitaker
Don Cheadle
Hugh Lang
Kelly Reilly
Nicole
John Goodman
Harling Mays
Bruce Greenwood
Charlie Anderson
Brian Geraghty
Ken Evans
Tamara Tunie
Margaret Thomason
Nadine Velazquez
Katerina Marquez

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: John Gatins
Languages: English
Countries: United States of America

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

MONEY

Did you know

Made its money back 5.2× over at the box office.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

ERA

Did you know

Released 14 years ago.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, shot by Don Burgess. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Alan Silvestri. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Jeremiah O'Driscoll shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle and Kelly Reilly carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

FACT

Did you know

Marketing tagline: "Some miracles are not what they seem.".

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt1907668 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Robert Zemeckis directs. Don Burgess behind the camera. Alan Silvestri scores. Jeremiah O'Driscoll cuts. Made its budget back several times over at the box office. Produced in United States of America. Dialogue in English.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Made its money back 5.2× over at the box office.
2Released 14 years ago.
3Directed by Robert Zemeckis, shot by Don Burgess. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
4Original score by Alan Silvestri. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
5Editor Jeremiah O'Driscoll shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
6Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle and Kelly Reilly carry the top of the cast.
7Marketing tagline: "Some miracles are not what they seem.".
8IMDB entry: tt1907668 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
9Classified under 24 themes, including "airplane", "confession", "investigation", "pilot".

The technical file

Cinematography: Don Burgess
Original score: Alan Silvestri
Editing: Jeremiah O'Driscoll
Production design: Nelson Coates
Costume design: Louise Frogley
Makeup / hair: Teressa Hill
VFX supervisor: Kevin Baillie
Sound: Dennis Leonard
Stunt coordinator: Charles Croughwell
Runtime: 138 min · 2h 18m
Aspect ratio (typical): 1.37:1 (Academy)
Status: Released
Budget: $31,000,000
Box office: $161,772,575
Return: 522% of budget
Original language: EN
Certification (US): R
IMDB: Flight (2012)

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Robert Zemeckis

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What people are saying

tmdb154355192021-04-15
★ 8/10
With Robert Zemekis at the helm, it has to be good, right? Pretty much. Not the strongest performance by Cheadle, but otherwise the cast is great. John Goodman is a welcome surprise half-way through and really brings this home. With a feel good ending, what more do you 1-3 star people want?? It's Denzel!!
tmdb280390232022-09-13
★ 6/10
The title Flight is a perfect illustration that brevity really is the soul of wit. Its six letters describe not only the protagonist's occupation (flying), but also what he spends most of the film doing (fleeing), and if we only added a seventh letter (-y), it would describe the character himself. The film itself could stand to be shorter, but overall it's no exception to the rule that no good movie is too long. In addition to illustrating the aforementioned Shakespearean principle, director Robert Zemeckis inverts a famous Simpsonian maxim; in this case, alcohol is first the solution and then the cause of all the problems. One can identify a compulsive smoker when he lights a cigarette with the butt of the previous one; Similarly, one can spot an alcoholic when he soothes his hangover with leftover beer from the day before — and that’s just the start of commercial pilot William 'Whip' Whitaker's (Denzel Washington) breakfast of champions. Whip is still drinking in the cabin of Flight 227 bound for Atlanta, making himself a screwdriver, or several, before taking a nap. He wakes with a start when the plane begins to nosedive. Unable to regain control, Whip is forced to make a controlled crash landing in an open field, saving most of the "102 souls" on board. This includes a maneuver where Whip flies the plane upside down, and it's not just him but also Zemeckis who takes a huge risk and lives to reap the reward. The scene avoids becoming unintentionally funny because part of its purpose is precisely to provide some much-needed humor to ease the almost unbearable tension; at the same time, it manages to stretch the audience's suspension of disbelief without breaking it for two reasons: 1) it has real precedent, and 2) it's exactly the kind of thing someone flying under the influence would do. There’s no doubt that Whip has the expertise to pull off this maneuver successfully; the question is whether he would have dared to execute it while sober. Moreover,, the cause of the accident is a mechanical failure completely unrelated to Whip's sorry physical state. But Flight is not, like Druk, an apology for alcoholism. In an inferior film the vehicle, be it a plane or a car, would crash as a direct result of the driver/pilot's drunkenness, and the driver/pilot would be the only or one of the few survivors, making him feel even guiltier. Flight instead debunks the myth of invincibility that every alcoholic invokes by leading us to believe, practically to the end, that Whip might very well be literally invincible. "Maybe I'm a fool," Whip muses, "because if I'd just told one more lie, I might have walked away from the whole mess." But he knows as well as we do that after that “one more lie” there would be another lie, and another, and another, and that eventually his lies would have caught up with him, because ultimately there is no escaping the negative effects of addiction. Like the similar Clean and Sober, Flight loses momentum with a Romantic Subplot that a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film doesn't need; on the other hand, I really liked Washington’s and Zemeckis's attention to detail — for example, when in the middle of crash landing Whip has the presence of mind to make a flight attendant tell her son that she loves him so that the box black can record it (in case they don’t make it), or the way his facial language unequivocally expresses the world of difference, the passage from hell to paradise, that exists before that first line of cocaine — supplied by John Goodman in a pair of hilarious cameos, each one heralded by the presence of “Sympathy for the Devil” on the soundtrack — and after.