Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 22, 1992 TAG: 9202220191
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THIS DISASTER MOVIE SUCCEEDS
"Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232" is revolutionary as airplane-disaster movies go. We don't meet the individual passengers aboard the plane, and we don't see them screaming and cringing when an engine blows up.We don't see them at all, in fact, until after the plane has crashed and rescue workers are trying to separate the dead from the living.
That 112 died is not the reason this film was made. That 184 survived is. "Crash Landing," the ABC Monday Night Movie, is disaster uplift, something to give you a little hope as well as a fantastic scare.
It's based on the crash of a United DC-10 at Sioux City, Iowa, on July 19, 1989. The plane, en route to Chicago, lost its rear engine and the use of all its hydraulic systems. The Federal Aviation Agency later blamed a faulty part in the engine, made by General Electric.
This is the story not of a catastrophe, however, but of how one was kept from being worse. Area governments and agencies had joined together in a disaster preparedness program that was to get a very tough test, and pass.
"Crash Landing" is as interested in putting a lump in your throat as in keeping you on the edge of your seat. It does both. I was bowled over.
Writer Harve Bennett and director Lamont Johnson, two savvy veterans, were determined to avoid disaster-movie cliches. That's one reason we don't get thumbnail sketches of the passengers before and during the flight. There are no shots inside the passenger cabin at all. When all hell breaks loose, the filmmakers concentrate on feverish efforts in the cockpit and on the rescue being readied 37,000 feet below.
Fire departments, paramedics and hospitals mobilize as the plane makes its wobbly approach to Sioux City, the pilot not at all sure he can maneuver the plane onto a runway, or even make the airport. The plane had become extremely difficult to steer and to control.
The first 15 minutes of the film are not terribly compelling. There's a glib fake-out involving a preparedness drill that we're at first led to believe is the real thing. A perfunctory character clash is introduced involving Gary Brown, who supervises the project, and Jim Hathaway, chief of the airport fire squad.
Richard Thomas and James Coburn do pretty good jobs, however, of making Brown and Hathaway believable. This is a film where everybody operates at exhilarating peak capacity.
Up in the cockpit, meanwhile, sits one of my least favorite actors of all time, pompous Charlton Heston, who has tainted his image with crackpot political activities offscreen. Although Heston has always been more convincing playing cardboard characters than those made of flesh and blood, he commands real respect here as the calm and quick-thinking pilot.
The crash occurs about halfway through the film. Videotaped news footage of the real thing, broadcast widely at the time, is mixed with simulated explosions. Director Johnson has one especially brilliant moment when he shows the crash reflected in the faces of the waiting rescuers, faces filled with awe and apprehension at the terrible sight they are witnessing.
There are other haunting shots, including one of dazed survivors wandering out of a smoke-filled cornfield. One little boy says he jumped from the plane, through an exit door opened by others, before the moment of impact. An Air Force colonel carries him to an ambulance when he is found in the wreckage.
This image of the colonel carrying the child is powerful, but so is a later scene set outside the hospital, where dozens of local citizens have lined up as volunteers to give blood needed for transfusions.
"Crash Landing" offers not cheap thrills but sweet reassurance. However cruel the world, kindness and heroism still exist. A crisis brought out the best in the people of Sioux City, and it brought out the best in those who made "Crash Landing" too. Washington Post Writers Group
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.