Black Box

Don't rely on comedians for aerodynamic engineering. They don’t make the entire plane out of the black box, because they want it to fly. Mathieu Vasseur understands the science of planes and how they crash. He also has a lot of character hang-ups, but a lack of dedication is not one of them. When a French flight crashes in the Alps, he is the best and worst person to investigate in Yann Gozlan’s Black Box, which is now screening in New York.

Vasseur has a history of neurotic-obsessive thoroughness at the French equivalent of the FAA that has gotten him into trouble with his superiors in the past. He also has an acutely sensitive sense of hearing that allows him to pick up on things others miss. Initially, his frustrated boss, Victor Pollock, freezes him out of the crash investigation, but when Pollock inexplicably goes AWOL, the agency head, Philippe Renier brings him back in.

At first, Vasseur uncovers a cry of “Allahu Akbar” on the black box tapes, but the more he digs, the more questions he has. Quite inconveniently, some of those questions involve a safety study partly conducted by his wife Noemie, who is adroitly navigating the revolving door between French regulatory agencies and aerospace companies. The more people in their circle try to gaslight Vasseur, the more he suspects design flaws were the cause.

The first hour and a half of Black Box have a lot of compelling audio tech procedural stuff that has earned the film comparisons to Blow Out. However, the last fortysome minutes revert to standard form (and no, it really need not run in-excess of two hours). Regardless, Fate is the Hunter remains the undisputed champion of plane crash investigation films and the first season of Departure covers some of the same causes, but with more interesting characters.

The Captain: Averting Even More Tragedy in Tibet

Captain Liu Changjian has been likened to a Chinese Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, but his heroic piloting occurred on a flight to an occupied sovereign nation: Tibet. Tibetans have suffered plenty thanks to Chinese imperialism, so at least he managed to save those onboard his flight. Nevertheless, the “optics” are awkward for the Chinese propaganda baked into Andrew Lau’s The Captain, which opens this Friday in New York.

Of course, state censors do not want the public to lose confidence in Sichuan Airlines, so the first twenty-five minutes of The Captain are dedicated to documenting the seemingly endless pre-flight safety checks conducted by the crew. Unfortunately, they are about as dramatic to watch as they sound. We meet several of the passengers, but never in any depth. They range from the predictable, like the panicky Westerner, to the deeply problematic, like the veteran PLA officer, who is returning to pay tribute to his fallen occupying comrades, who died in an avalanche, in what could very well be a case of divine retribution.

The trickiest part of the flight from Chengdu to Llhasa is the stretch over the Tibetan Plateau, where it is impossible to decrease attitude to a safer level should the cabin become depressurized. Alas, that is exactly what happens when the cockpit windshield freakishly shatters. To make matters worse, their course will take them through the center of a massive storm. To save his crew and the passengers in their charge, Captain Liu will have to do some fancy flying.

The twenty minutes or so that depict the crisis itself are nicely done, but everything else that come before it and after it looks and sounds conspicuously like padding. Plus, the patriotic rah-rah ending clangs like a massively discordant note.