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The film begins as the aforementioned company man (Hugh Laurie) calls a halt to an unprofitable oilfield venture in Mongolia and brings in pilot Frank Towns (Quaid) to fly equipment and personnel back to home base. The shutdown rankles for the site supervisor (Miranda Otto), but she and her crew see the writing on the wall and board the plane. Also claiming a seat is an enigmatic hanger-on named Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi), whose addition, in the pilot’s opinion, makes the aircraft too heavy. Minutes later, the plane runs into a savage sandstorm, and as Towns tries to skirt the maelstrom rather than go back, the plain crash-lands in the Gobi. Fatalities from impact as well as A Series of Unfortunate Events on the ground reduce the original passenger manifest to a nucleus of ten who must decide whether to conserve food and water and wait for a rescue, or consume resources more aggressively while throwing themselves into a work project to build a smaller viable plane out of the wreckage of the larger one.

In true movie fashion Elliott, the eleventh-hour wild card, turns out to be a designer of airplanes, so he ensconces himself as the brains of the operation. (There’s brawn enough, too. Directors these days seem to grab opportunities to highlight Dennis Quaid’s abs; the six-pack has not blurred any since BREAKING AWAY twenty-five years ago.) For all of Elliott’s acuity, however, he definitely lacks people skills. He becomes swollen with entitlement and even a little sadistic in his supervision. Add to the personality conflicts encroaching despair, explosions of surplus fuel, an electrical storm, hostile nomads, the introduction of a gun to the camp, and One Final Secret, and you have a few setbacks before liftoff.

PHOENIX was first made into a film back in 1965, with Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, and Ian Bannen. That crash took place in the Sahara. This time around we change venue and encounter a more even-handed demographic mix. Is it more culturally valuable, story-wise, to make something out of the new gender and ethnic representation, or to treat it as utterly incidental? This film does the latter. In the original PHOENIX, the airplane designer was of German extraction, which may partially explain why, in this version, Giovanni Ribisi has a blazing platinum dye job and an accent that combines early Brando with Sidney from “The Pretender.” Those quirks alone are enough to make Elliott is the most interesting portrayal—which gives you some idea how undifferentiated the other characters are.

The survivors look only slightly weather-beaten by the end of the movie—there’s a lot of clapping each other on the back, so sunburn must not have been a problem. Complaining too much about the cast seems churlish. They do honorable work. It’s just that I’ve experienced several of them giving much more in different circumstances. Even if it makes sense to have the characters fall into pondering the hereafter in the face of the long odds against them, director John Moore (BEHIND ENEMY LINES) chooses to keep the wasteland reverie to a minimum and concentrates instead on the white-knuckle moments. There are enough here to make you wish your theatre seat had a snug lap belt.

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originally posted: 12/20/04 14:13:55
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