When the windshield of his commercial airplane shatters at 30,000 feet in the air, a pilot and his flight crew work to ensure the safety of the passengers and land the plane.
“The Captain,” filmed in 2019, is an exaggerated mockumentary of the incident with Sichuan Airlines Flight 8633 in which a flight from Chongqing Jiangbei Airport to Lhasa Gonggar Airport was forced to make an emergency landing after its cockpit cabin window shattered from an impact while flying through the icy mountains in China. The film was endorsed by the Civil Aviation Administration of China and many real professionals in the aviation industry were a part of the joint process in filming.
The captain of the flight is played by Zhang Hanyu, a veteran in the industry with the perfect amount of charisma to play a character leading a crew rather than one scaring a team into submission. His character, Liu Chiang Jian, displays a humorous level of stoicism that contrasts his heartfelt backstory of being a father to a young girl. However, his presence on screen becomes lost amongst the chaos of the CGI-ed flight and the importance of his character is no longer existent amidst all the other heartfelt backstories that the film tries to cram in between the flight sequences.
There is not much more to the plot except visually describing the emergency landing and the overall incident. The film tries to humanize the event – creating a backstory for the captains, flight attendants, and even the passengers by showing existing relationships. The film intends to incite empathetic emotions from the audience towards the passengers, but all I felt was a dramatic exaggeration that distanced my emotions from the characters and the story. The realism became lost amongst the excessive CGI of the plane flying through the skies, an obvious distinction due to the almost impossibility of the angles in which the plane was traveling.
The most redeeming quality of the film was actress Yuan Quan, who played the head flight attendant on Flight 8633. She was a beacon of hope for the passengers on board who were distraught from their seemingly impending doom. While the spotlight on her inspirational speech was dramatized, her presence on screen gave me a deeper understanding of why these stories are shared. It is not about the extremity of these events that should lead to wide media coverage, but it is about the steadfast individuals who are able to survive and live to tell the tales of human resilience in times of adversity.
The actual plane incident is still undergoing investigation, but the crew members on the flight are still remembered as heroes that prevented a terrible circumstance from exploding into a tragedy.
Available on Blu-ray™, DVD & Digital March 31st from Well Go USA Entertainment
