On October 21, 2001, Jim Barker (Ed Hunter) was waiting for a flight when he ran into an old friend, Karl Johnson (Eddie Rex). The two sit down for a few minutes to catch up on old times. Jim has a successful job at a furniture company, and is on his way to Las Vegas for a business trip. Karl is an airline pilot, and is waiting for a flight later in the day, though he doesn’t know what his destination is. But after Karl leaves for his upcoming flight, Jim began to read the newspaper where he learned the sad truth about his old friend Karl.
Content
This was a very interesting story, in the vein of M. Night Shyamalan-type films with a great twist at the end. It was a little hard to understand what was going on, but that plays very well for this type of film. Given the title, the audience is sort of expecting some kind of an unusual twist, so all of the strange occurrences in the movie – such as how Karl seems to suddenly appear, or the unusual way in which he talks – just add to the feeling that something weird is going to happen.
Perhaps my favorite part of this film was the fact that Karl’s voice sounded an awful lot like Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Once again, this does a lot to add to the eerie feeling of the movie.
Visual Look
Though most of the shots in the movie are fixed, there was one moving shot that I really liked. When Jim is walking through the terminal, there is a handheld shot that follows him from behind. As this takes place after he’s had his rather eerie conversation with Karl, this does a lot to enhance the mood of the film.
However, I noticed several big problems as far as visual elements were concerned. First off, there were a lot of washed out scenes, both indoors and outdoors. While shooting outside, washout can be corrected by properly white balancing, making sure that the f-stop on the camera isn’t set too high, (as with regular 35mm still cameras, the higher the f-stop number, the less amount of light is being let into the camera), and – if all else fails – using a neutral density (ND) filter to cut down the amount of sunlight being let into the camera.
As to the indoor scenes, some problems were caused by the shot in which Jim walks into the airport – light outside the door washes out the indoor scene, turning Jim into a black silhouette. A better idea may have been to follow Jim inside with a handheld, or to shoot this scene from a different angle. Also, when Jim and Karl sit down to talk, they are seated at a table against a wall of windows. This seems to cause a lot of exposure problems; at least in each person’s individual shot. It may have been better to shoot this scene in a completely different area or, if that wasn’t possible, to hang up curtains of some kind to help minimize the amount of light coming in. However, the two-shot that was used looked to be properly exposed.
As two different points in the movie, the film cuts suddenly to black, and then back to the action occurring. This is very jarring for an audience, as a sudden cut to black usually means that the film is over or that some catastrophe has occurred. However, it seems that this cut is really only used to show the passage of time. The first time it happens is right between when Jim and Karl first encounter each other, and when they are sitting down at a table and talking. Not only is the cut to black very sudden and disorienting, but after the picture returns, the two of them are only shown in single shots – as they were before – but with different backgrounds. So rather than paying attention to the dialogue, the audience is stuck trying to figure out where the characters are and why everything is different. Only after Karl and Jim finish their conversation do we see them in a two-shot, indicating their location. On the one hand, this type of a break with convention can be used to add to the mood of the film; such as the way in which Memento was shown in little segments and assembled backwards which kept the audience just as disoriented as the main character. Airport 9/11, however, it’s a little too disorienting. There are some good unsettling elements that already exist in the film without making it too over-the-top. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to use a dissolve – which is usually used to indicate passage of time – then cut to a two-shot before going to the individual close-ups.
