How Real Tragedies Make This Cheesy Horror FIlm All Too Real
Most of the time, half the fun of a cheesy horror film is laughing at something that’s not likely to happen. For example, we can giggle our way through Snakes On a Plane largely because the idea of our flight turning into a series of slithering snake attacks is ridiculous. However, the recent airplane/shark horror thriller No Way Up is accidentally that much scarier because it involves a plane crashing due to incidents similar to the otherwise unexpected and unexplained phenomena that have been happening to so many real planes in recent history.
The Movie
No Way Up features a group of colorful characters (including a bodyguard played by Star Trek legend Colm Meaney) who are taking what is meant to be a short flight from California to Cabo when a bird flies through the engine. This is a relatively common occurrence during flight (more on this in a minute), but it results in a catastrophic engine explosion that brings the entire plane down into the Pacific Ocean, leaving survivors scrambling to find more oxygen and avoid the hungry sharks swimming into the plane.
Re: The Birds
In the context of No Way Up, the bird flying through the engine is meant to explain what brings the entire plane down. In real life, birds frequently fly through engines all the time, but the most likely thing to get damaged is the fan blade itself. This may sometimes result in something as dramatic as an engine dying, but planes can typically safely land even with just one engine (just ask the heroic Captain Sully).
Real Life Parallels
That brings us back to what makes No Way Up so accidentally creepy. After the bird flies through the engine, that engine almost immediately catches fire while pieces of it start flying off. The shrapnel flying from the damaged engine pierces the plane cabin, and most onboard are sucked out of the plane to a grisly death long before the survivors have to deal with sharks in the ocean depths.
When watching No Way Up, the only reasonable conclusion is that the bird entering the engine was merely the catalyst for a catastrophic equipment failure. It’s impossible to see this accident near the beginning of the film without thinking about Boeing’s recent airplane woes. One of the most high-profile incidents occurred in January when an Alaska Airlines jet manufactured by Boeing had a door mysteriously fly off; cellphones and even a child’s shirt flew out, and it’s a miracle that no passengers were sucked out to their deaths.
Boeing
The hits just kept coming for Boeing, including the FAA warning about equipment issues that could cause certain planes to lose thrust. In February, pilots of a United Airlines 737 Max jet reported that their flight controls jammed up while they were landing the plane. That’s separate, of course, from an incident with an American Airlines Boeing 777 having to make an emergency landing due to suspected mechanical problems, which itself marked the sixth Boeing aircraft issue in a 10-day period.
Other Planet Disaster Movies Don’t Hit So Close To Home
Movie lovers are used to exotic plane risks, including damage from that Twilight Zone gremlin or all those snakes that Samuel L. Jackson had to heroically fight. Those threats are comfortably fictional, but the bevy of Boeing incidents has us worried that No Way Up is likely to happen any day now. If it happens to you, here’s hoping you have Star Trek’s Colm Meaney to keep you safe or you might get eaten by a shark quicker than you can say “beam me up.”
