The Captain

THE CAPTAIN - Bona Film Group

The Captain otherwise known as The Chinese Pilot, directed by Andrew Lau, charts the frighteningly true story of Sichuan Airlines Flight 8633, of which the aeroplane's windscreen failed, leading to decompression midflight causing chaos and a fight to land the aircraft safely with no casualties.

Lau's film milks every second of the reported thirty-five-minute terrifying incident into a one-hundred-and-fifty-minute adventure film. The central incident is contained in a prologue to the events and an epilogue detailing the aftermath, but the central storyline is everything that happens onboard Flight 8633 — it is without a doubt the strongest attribute of the film.

This central set piece is intense and engaging and while it is predominately melodramatic and severely overblown considering its humanistic output, it is as captivating as it is striking. It's just a shame that the majority of the camera work is conveyed in this contextual sense of chaos with a resulting shaky cam. While it works quite effectively in the ferocious intensity of the initial set-piece, it ultimately swarms the screen evoking more motion blur than compelling filmmaking.

The screenplay from Xu Zhiyong is quite light throughout, with very little depth and weight afforded to its core cast list. Aside from a few glancing scenes that cut away in moments in peril, suggesting these core characters have families, the viewer struggles to have a strong sense of connection to the film aside from the catastrophe present.

The Captain is released October 4th and 18th in the U.K. and U.S. respectively.