The trailer sold me - the description a bit less so. Perhaps it’s a cognitive disconnect, but when the description tells me it’s going to be a feminist adventure I have horror-flashbacks to that one Ghostbusters movie and how that was squandered away.Pleasantly for me however, this was quite subdued - in fact, it barely felt like that at all. Yeah, it touches on the classic era topics of discrimination through verbal banter and the likes, but it’s not actively trying to make all men look like monsters and instead feels like it’s just a believable little snippet of what could have been - well, until the more fantastical elements start up. Still, despite not being this unblemished angel herself, our leading lady can kick some butt and show some ingenuity that could impress on her adventure. Just what is that adventure you ask?
Well, here’s a review complication - I can’t really go into what the classified mission she’s on is in depth, because that spoils a bit of the movie - and I do my best to generally keep these mostly spoiler free. As the movie starts, despite showing us some shots that would allude to some mysterious questionable nature to what we are being told, is that a woman is on a classified mission to transport the contents of what looks to be a radio box to her destination, and she’s been put aboard a plane flying to Samoa with some hardware. This in a time of superstition, war, and let’s be honest - more open racism and sexism - provides some tensions between the crew of the bomber and our lead, and things start to get more intense from there. Enemy plains, a mysterious creature on the plane - and the secret of the box all await the viewer of this one.
Now, from the trailer I thought the monster was just some generic bat creature, but then (thanks to the reminder caused by the opening cartoon) I realized what it was supposed to be. The monster of this movie is a gremlin - not the furry cute until fed late kind, but a living representation of the old “my gear is falling apart and I don’t know why” kind. As far as it’s presented, it might have some mischievous nature in the things it does to hamper the plane’s performance, but it fells much more as though it’s simply a natural beast going about doing what it does. It helps ground it somewhat in the setting - and it might sound funny, but it’s not the most unbelievable thing about this movie. That really goes to one of the later effects, visible in a trailer when a person uses and explosion to turn their falling down into some flying up - and I mean literal person, not the plane. Look, it’s a bit dumb schlocky at times, but you don’t pitch me a movie about an old plane crew and a woman fist-fighting a gremlin and have me expect it to be this super-high brow artsy tear jerker of a movie. No, you pitch me that and I expect something I’d see on the SyFy channel with perhaps better acting and some form of budget.
