December 17, 2004 | I fully realize that not everybody has the time (or inclination) to take a second or third look at an older movie immediately before viewing its remake. After all, unless you’re paid to watch movies for a living, you likely don’t think of a visit to the megaplex as an activity that requires advance research. Still, I can’t help but marvel at how many critics – and, for that matter, how many plain ol’ movie buffs — are waxing nostalgic about Robert Aldrich’s original Flight of the Phoenix while eviscerating John Moore’s newly released update. Gee whiz, have any of these people actually looked at Aldrich’s film lately? I think not.
The original may have seemed a solid and well-crafted piece of work back in 1965, but it certainly hasn’t aged well. (See for yourself, it’s readily available on DVD.) Despite a first-rate cast led by James Stewart, and a few effectively tense face-offs between suitably intense characters, Aldrich’s film seems creaky, plodding and, at 149 minutes, impossibly padded. And how about that goofy “mirage” scene, included in the original only so they could feature a hubba-hubba dancing girl in the trailer? (Once again, check out the DVD – the trailer’s there for your amusement.) The ’65 Phoenix is very much a product of its time. And that time, for better or worse, has lost passed.
The new version may not be an Oscar contender – unlike the original, which received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Ian Bannen) and Film Editing – but at least it moves. Normally, I’m against remakes as a matter of principle. But this is one case where a remake actually is an improvement.
Recycling most plot specifics from the ’65 film – which, like the remake, is based on a novel by Elleston Trevor – Moore’s version pivots on a simple but efficient set-up: After a C-119 cargo transport plane crash-lands in an unforgiving desert during a raging sandstorm, veteran pilot Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid in the role originally played by Stewart) and other surviving passengers (mostly oil-company employees) face almost certain death as water and food suppliers dwindle. Just when all seems lost, a bespectacled eccentric named Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi, appropriately fussy and often funny) announces that, as an aircraft designer, he knows how to build a single-engine plane from what’s left of the C-119. Mind you, everybody else will have to do all the heavy lifting while Elliott supervises. But since nobody else has a better idea, and there’s really nothing better to do, even the initially dubious Towns agrees to participate in the last-chance construction project.
During the original Phoenix, Aldrich subtly insinuated that the often-rancorous relationship the pilot and the designer (played in ’65 as a humorless German technocrat by Hardy Kruger) could be read as a metaphor for the age-old conflict between impulsive individualism and dispassionate reason. John Moore isn’t a filmmaker who places much stock in subtlety – remember, this is the guy who gave us Behind Enemy Lines, a run-and-gun popcorn movie with Owen Wilson as a downed naval pilot pursued by hordes of bloodthirsty Serbians. To his credit, however, Moore is very good at wringing suspense from the group dynamics of disparate individuals driven to extremes.
The new Phoenix, which transports the original movie’s plot from the Sahara to the Gobi Desert, is more demographically diverse than its all-white, all-male predecessor (two African-Americans and a woman are along for the ride this time). And while the new version is conspicuously less star-studded – in addition to Stewart and Kruger, Aldrich’s movie had Richard Attenborough, Ernest Borgnine, Peter Finch and Dan Duryea – Moore gets generally fine work from an ensemble that includes Hugh Laurie (of TV’s House) as a snide oil-company executive and Miranda Otto as a take-no-guff oil-rig boss. The CGI special effects used for the plane crash are suitably spectacular. And while Dennis Quaid is seven years younger than James Stewart was when the latter starred in Aldrich’s Phoenix, he looks every bit as grave and grizzled. Indeed, the older Quaid gets, the more he demonstrates the right stuff as an effortlessly authoritative screen presence.
