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movie review - Flight of the Phoenix

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is a flick set in the Gobi desert. It chronicles the unhappy tale of a fatal plane crash in that enourmous stretch of dry sand and rock, involving the crew of a failed oil rig and their pilots.

The survivors are faced with an utterly inhospitable environment, a band of bandits, and their suspicion that they've been written off by the company that was flying them through the terrain.

Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi and a talented supporting cast carry the decent if not stellar plot well. It was a pleasure to see that the story stayed away from the two extremes of the "stranded misfits getting offed one by one" (e.g. Anaconda, Lake Placid, Ghosts of Mars, etc ad infinitum) on the one end and the overwrought drama at the other. You strongly suspect that everything is going to work out (the role of the bandits, for instance, is poorly utilized) but the characters and their interaction work well enough to see it through.

Recommended.