This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine, why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Is there a rule that airborne movies have to have a one-word title? Gerard Butler’s latest action thriller is called Plane, perhaps because Airplane was taken, as were Flight and Airport and Sully. Though to be fair, the last one only works if your hero is called Chelsey Sullenberger.

I am a sucker for flying and for films about it, and Plane doesn’t disappoint. “This is one view that never gets old,” Butler’s pilot comments as he looks down the runway before take-off, which is exactly how I feel. Feeling your plane power down the runway and then leave the ground is magical. I’ve been a passenger on big jets and small, on RAF transports and US Army Chinook helicopters, and it’s never not been fun.

Airlines have done their best to suppress the joy of flight, cramming us into tighter spaces filled with plastic and polyester in an apparent effort to give international travel the same glamour as a bus ride through Swindon. However terrible the food or tight the legroom, they’ll never win whilst passengers can glance out of a window and realise they’re looking down on a mountain range.

Miles Kington once theorised that airports, with their endless mazes of corridors and apparently random instructions, were designed to mentally prepare passengers for the experience of being hijacked. Maybe the irritations of passenger flight are there to distract us from the thought that if this all goes wrong, we’ll be an awfully long way off the ground.

It’s this nagging idea that makes planes such a great setting for films. The 1970s golden era of disaster movies kicked off with Airport, in which a pilot faces a series of mounting disasters whilst trying to get his passenger jet safely onto the ground. It ended with Airplane! — a spoof so successful that it pretty much killed the genre.

Plane does a good job of capturing the tension between the routine nature of air travel and vague possibility of danger. We know, of course, that “Something Will Go Wrong”, but first there’s just the right amount of the familiar rituals of international travel, the reminder that most of the time being an airline pilot probably isn’t all that glamorous.

Go wrong something does, when the aircraft is struck by lightning and loses power. Butler is forced to land on an island in the Philippines which is, he realises, run by bandits who will see his passengers as excellent fodder for ransom demands.

What follows is a well-handled little adventure. You sense it was probably pitched as “Die Hard On An Island”, but it’s more subtle than that. For an action star, Butler is content to let his co-star Mike Colter do most of the fighting. Where he shines, and for me the highlight of the film, is the ten-minute cockpit sequence after the lightning strike as the crew struggle to regain control of the aircraft.

When Clint Eastwood announced that he was going to make a film of the “Miracle on the Hudson” — the 2009 accident when a New York passenger flight was forced to ditch just after take-off — the reasonable question was how you make a 90-minute film out of a journey that lasted, from start to finish, less than a tenth of that time.

The result, Sully, got the action of the crash out of the way early, dealing instead with how Tom Hanks’s pilot coped with the aftermath of the accident. It used much the same formula as Flight, where Denzel Washington’s alcoholic pilot is in the habit of off setting the effects of the booze with a little cocaine before take-off. It works well enough for him to handle disaster when it strikes, but leaves him with problems once on the ground.

On the ground, Plane is a superior action drama. In the air, it’s a delight

All three films have terrific cockpit sequences that capture the ideal of what we all hope is happening up front at such a moment: skilled professionals keeping their cool in the face of catastrophe. All manage to stay on the right side of the Airplane! line: gripping without being ridiculous. On the ground, Plane is a superior action drama. In the air, it’s a delight.

The same, sadly, can’t really be said of Devotion — another one-word-title film about pilots, this time in the Korean War. Currently streaming on Prime Video, Devotion is the story of Jesse Brown, the first black pilot in the US Navy.

It frequently looks amazing, and that’s somehow the problem. The ease with which computer artists can just add another plane or six to every battle, as the sun glints off the water, leaves much of the film feeling like a computer game. Four years ago Midway (there really must be a Hollywood rule about the titles) had the same problem.

It’s great that studios can now generate aircraft carriers and squadrons on screen down to the tiniest detail, but they haven’t yet worked out how to make them feel real.

It feels like a cinematic version of the problem with the craze for articles written by artificial intelligence: they’re almost there, but not quite.

The one film without this problem was Top Gun: Maverick, where the makers went to huge expense to use real planes as much as they possibly could. It made all the difference. Or perhaps it was simply that they had a three-word title.