This past weekend, I slid into an assigned seat on what I think was the biggest airplane I have ever been on. Stuck between a window and a stranger for a flight over the Atlantic, I decided to seize the moment to do what is probably only acceptable 40,000 feet in the sky — watch movies for eight hours straight. But something happens when you’re crammed into a dark box, stuck staring at a screen. Maybe it’s the five stages of grief; maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. You start to question the lull you find yourself in and the movies that put you there. Are the options hand-picked by Delta part of some psy-op? Are they purposely designed to be insanity-inducingly average? As I sit here on yet another flight (a cool four hours), unable to bring myself to select yet another movie from their lacking options, it might be time to unpack the art of selecting an in-flight movie, an art I’ve based on the four movies I watched on my trek across the Atlantic.
The re-evaluated classic
Coming back from my 7-week trip abroad, I definitely wanted something that felt like home. The first movie I cued up was something that I hadn’t seen in a long time, “The Princess Bride.” I know what you’re thinking: “I love that movie!” But sitting there, watching Wesley beat the Rodent Of Unusual Size to death while Buttercup just stood there and watched, I was pissed. It’s a great movie — funny, charming and quotable. But Buttercup is, like, super annoying. I know it’s true love, but if I’m ever that depressed over a guy, you have permission to knock me over the head and use me to start a war with Florin. Seriously.
Complaints aside, being suspended in the air with nowhere else to go is the perfect place to grapple with movies you watched growing up and want a fresh set of eyes on. I’d also throw any romantic comedy watch in this category. I know I’ve seen “The Proposal” in the Delta library before, and some of you need to watch that one with the type of critical thinking that only being isolated in a metal tube without access to Letterboxd comments can provide. Free yourself from the internet’s opinions! Make the most of the limited time to unplug.
The fast-paced flick
I asked my mom what, in her opinion, made a good airplane movie. The only answer she provided was something loud enough for her bad ears to hear over the engine and ambient airplane noise. Okay, a bit of a non-answer, but this falls neatly into the second movie I chose on my eight-hour escapade, and what is one of the most important parts of an airplane movie: pacing. In-flight entertainment is designed to burn your time, ensuring you are not feeling every excruciating moment of the child behind you kicking your seat. “Ocean’s Eleven” was the movie I chose — my seat partner, who was apparently hip to my burgeoning airplane-movie philosophy, chose one of the Mission Impossible installments. They both ultimately achieve the same goal: a movie that takes you to so many places, logistically and geographically, that you forget where you are. It’s not my favorite genre of movie, but it’s a good place to turn while your movement is so entirely restricted, and you need to live vicariously through someone.
This genre scratches a different itch as well. The sad truth is that I often go on my phone while watching movies on land, but not here! In the lawless world of the sky, my phone essentially becomes a brick because I refuse to figure out in-flight Wi-Fi. These action movies are able to provide a remnant of the over-stimulation I have become accustomed to on my devices. Maybe it’s not as emotionally comforting as a more classic movie, but the movie knows I need 50 things happening at once and 12 jump cuts a minute to keep me awake. I’ll take it.
Pseudo-propagandistic feel-good
Yeah, I’m not super proud of this one. I think I just wanted to shut off my brain at this point, so I went somewhere I haven’t been since the swim season of my senior year of high school, to a movie my coach would have us watch every year. “Miracle” follows the assembly of the 1980 Olympic Hockey team and a fantastic underdog story about hard work, hope and, yeah, beating the Russians. The whole American excellence thing is a bit of a hard pill to swallow right now, but I think it’s a good reminder about what some light American propaganda can look like, even disguised as an underdog story.
These movies are selected and placed in front of us. We are limited by what Delta allows, stuck with “Miracle” and whatever Marvel has shilled out recently. Like “The Princess Bride,” there’s so much time to revisit these movies and laugh at the weird ways they’re reinforcing more traditional messages and worldviews, and maybe up in the sky, they feel a bit less removed from reality. Someone knows that they’re bogus, not one of those serious movies that we watch on land. Or maybe the cabin pressure is getting to me.
The straight-to-streaming time-suck
No one goes into these movies knowing they’re going to be terrible. Although I might have had a clue in the case of “The Luckiest Man in America.” The movie follows the true story of a man who won way too much money on the game show “Press Your Luck” by memorizing the patterns of the board. An entire subcategory of this particular airplane movie category is these weird biopics that we keep getting because of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the weird number of prequels, sequels and reboots that studios seem to have nowadays. What I don’t understand about “The Luckiest Man in America,” however, is that this random man does not have street cred with the average person. Who did they think was going to see this movie? I genuinely think only Walton Goggins (“The Righteous Gemstones”) die-hards and myself. I don’t blame Freddie Mercury or “Press Your Luck” for my entrapment, though. The blame lies fully with YouTubers Rhett and Link, who did an episode about this man. It stuck with me. I wanted to know more. And you know what? That 13-minute YouTube video was better than this movie.
Thus the curse of the straight-to-streaming slop. Movies that only serve to fuel my cine2nerdle addiction, but are nevertheless a rite of passage for when your cabin fever starts to set in. They exist as a sort of shared psychosis that can only be accessed in the sky.
I like telling people about the weird niche airplane movies I watched, in the same way some people like to talk about their dreams. What odd, cast-aside movie you choose to adopt in those choice moments above the ground perhaps speaks to who you are in a weird way. An airplane can capture the same magic that a movie theater can. You discover what you notice with your undivided attention and can find yourself in that liminal movie above the sky that maybe still feels a little unreal.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
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