Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Turbulent Skies (2010)

The description for the film stated that a plane with a load of celebrity guests on board ran into a problem in the air. Fantastic!  It reminds me of the big disaster movies of the 1970s. I was pretty excited to see who the celebrity guests were, even I figured it would be the typical formerly famous Asylum star power.  After watching the film, I have no idea what they were talking about.  Who were these supposed celebrities?  The only people on the flight were reporters.

At a press conference for their new technology that eliminates the need for pilots, Charles ( the too-big-for-his-own-britches son of the owner) decides to invite everyone on a cross country flight to show how great the CD70 system works. The chief programmer is alarmed as they haven't agreed to this and haven't done a test flight yet. He's even more worried when he finds out his wife, the head of Research, is on the flight.

The movie is just ramping up the cliche level when the safety inspectors come on board to do a fail safe check and one of the options takes three tries for it to work. Now I would hope that would be a serious concern, even if it wasn't a test flight, but these guys don't mention it to anyone, including the head of Research who is on board.  So I guess the safety guys are fine with everyone going to their fiery deaths.

There are two pilots on the test flight just in case something goes wrong. But reminiscent of 70s disaster films in the Airport series or the parody Airplane, both pilots end up unconscious and an untrained woman has to land the plane.  Plus the computer turns out to be infected with a virus - caused by Charles when he uploaded an unauthorized change to the mainframe - and sabotages her every move. Argh!

The CD70 system looks like a round glass ashtray with a blue light under it. The controls for the system are a keyboard inconveniently located on the wall. And when I say it's on the wall, I don't mean sitting on a keyboard tray horizontal to the wall. The keyboard is pasted flat against the wall so that whoever uses it needs to type on a 90 degree angle to ensure they get carpal tunnel syndrome.

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