By Conner Smith

Flight looked damn good.
I sat there in the movie theater last year, eyes bulging at the screen, body shaking in excitement and my popcorn falling all over the floor.
The movie was racy and the trailer had the classic rock and roll circus that got your blood boiling and ready for an awesome movie.
Many movie goers, including myself, came to the movie expecting something very different than what was given to us. The trailer showed us the fast-action, moment-by-moment suspense of an aerial disaster.
Through level-headedness and smart thinking, Captain Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is able to roll the jet, stopping its deadly plunge from 30,000 feet, and finally set it down behind a church. Although the ordeal was over, it wasn’t calm. The jet violently struck the ground, caught fire, and tore apart at the seams.
Through blood-soaked eyes, Whitaker could remember only being pulled out of his seat onto a stretcher and hoisted into an ambulance before being driven off to a hospital. Hours later he awakes.
The doctor reports to him that he suffered no permanent injuries. Whitaker is also told that out of 102 people on the plane, only six had died: two crew, and four passengers. Unfortunately for Whitaker, even the minor loss of life required the FAA to investigate the cause of the crash. Whip is at a brunch when he discovers that he had blood drawn as soon as he was pulled into the hospital. He had traces of cocaine and a 0.24 blood alcohol content reading.
This is all given in the trailer, including the information that crimes like this could be punishable by life in prison. This led me to believe that I would be seeing a movie about whether or not Whitaker would be taken to prison or not.

 
That wasn’t the case.

 
Most people thought this would be about the investigation of the crash. To almost everyone’s surprise, the movie twisted the plot and revealed something larger.
Whip did not simply have a casual alcoholic drink the night before. The captain was a full-blown alcoholic and cocaine user. He would drink in heavy amounts, and proceed to do doses of cocaine to make him feel alert from the effects of the depressant.
The true nature of the movie revolves around how Whip is desperately trying to appear strong before his peers, when he is really weak and broken inside. Whip always knew what he was doing was wrong he wasn’t proud of it.
He was at rock bottom.
But he needed the plane crash to show him that.
The disaster in the sky had saved himself from complete and total mental breakdown. The plane crash had awakened him to the truth of his personal crash and the detail that was put into the movie was astounding. The producers could have easily made it just another disaster movie about just another flight. But they didn’t take the easy way out. They put a twist into the storyline that many people could relate to. The story of the struggle within a man, and how it nearly tore him in two until he was finally able to admit to being an alcoholic and to stop lying to himself and to the world.
Personally, I found the movie to be in-depth and worth seeing. Of course, I must also say that some would find it emotionally troubling. It does force the viewer to ask themselves: “Who are you?”