Airport (1970)
Directed by George Seaton
An airport manager tries to keep his terminals open during a snowstorm, while a suicide bomber plots to blow up a Boeing 707 airliner in flight.
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What critics compared Airport to
As satisfyingly hokey and full of Designated Colorful Characters as any of the great 1970s human-face-of-disaster epics ? the four Airport sagas, The Towering Inferno, etc. ? on which director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin (the 1994 Stargate team, who also wrote the screenplay) drew for inspiration.
In many ways, "Everest" is a throwback to the grand old disaster films of the 1970s like "The Poseidon Adventure" and "Airport."
Like the 1970s "Airport" movies, the passenger list has a one-of-everything quality, including a doctor, a cop, honeymooners and a charming moppet traveling alone.
Many are over-qualified for the assignment, similar to the way stage legend Helen Hayes played a little old lady stowaway in 1970's " Airport ".
Allen didn't really invent the disaster movie; that honor probably goes to Airport (1970), with Dean Martin trying to land a Boeing 707 that's been crippled by a terrorist bombing.
With the sort of all-star cast you used to find in 1970s movies such as The Towering Inferno or Airport , Soderbergh also probes the global political systems in place to cope with such outbreaks, dredging up stats from Sars panics, Aids epidemics and even the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918 which claimed up to 50 million lives.
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Having seen all of the epic disaster films of the 1970s – what might be called the Irwin Allen era – (featuring The Towering Inferno, Airport, The Poseidon Adventure and others), and the occasional disaster revival film of the 1980s (When Time Ran Out) and 1990s (Deep Impact, The Perfect Storm), I’d say that this Roland Emmerich movie must be considered among the best.
The reason for this is because the ZAZ team framed their zaniest conceits (having Barbara Billingsley trade jive with two unreceptive African-Americans, sparking a ferocious, furniture-smashing barroom brawl between two Girl Scouts, undercutting a scene of plane cabin panic by having a big-breasted woman run in front of the action for a single jiggly second) with an uncredited, scene-for-scene fabrication of a forgotten ‘50s airplane actioneer called Zero Hour (based on a novel by Airport author Arthur Hailey).
A movie about the emergency landing of a US Airways passenger jet on New York’s Hudson River by pilot Chesley Sullenberger in 2009 could have been merely banal, like a fact-based, action-oriented remake of those 1970s Airport disaster movies.
Growing up in the 1970s meant a constant stream of them, from every increasingly goofy entry in the "Airport" franchise and "The Towering Inferno" to B-level crap like "Meteor" or "Damnation Alley."
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Plane plays out like a fusion of Airport (the disaster-in-the-sky franchise that was popular during the 1970s and was lampooned by Airport in 1980) and Rambo (insofar as that was about a bloody jungle rescue).