The thing I like most about the trailer for Plane — the movie where Gerard Butler flies a plane — is that it packs more into about 150 seconds than most movies can fit into two hours. There is honestly so much going on here. Too much, probably, which is in no way a complaint. This sucker opens with Gerard Butler sipping coffee as passengers board the commercial flight he is in charge of flying safely from one airport to another and ends with him running through the jungle with a possibly wrongly convicted murderer at his side and both of them are carrying automatic weapons and/or sledgehammers. More movie trailers should do this. Like, exactly this. Just use this as the trailer for every movie whether it is about Gerard Butler flying a plane or not. I don’t know if I’ll ever see this movie from beginning to end — I have a strong suspicion I’ll catch chunks of it on basic cable at various points over the next five years — but I do know this: I have watched this trailer at least 10 times since it premiered less than 24 hours ago. I recommend you do the same. I mean…
Look at this.
LOOK AT IT.
Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to watch that trailer two or three more times to really soak in all the wild junk that’s happening here and then you are going to meet me below for a discussion of the wild junk we all just saw. I’m going to rank it from least to most wild. It’s going to be really dumb. I’m pretty excited.
Okay… here we go.
5. The entire opening 30 seconds
The first 30 seconds of this trailer feature:
- Gerard Butler as the pilot of a commercial airplane
- Mike Colter as a convicted murderer who is being escorted onto the flight by government-types who are transporting him to a new location
- Gerard Butler saying things like “let’s not scare the passengers” and “let’s have a good flight,” which is pretty much a guarantee that these passengers are going to be terrified and have a bad flight
- The plane flying through a bunch of scary-looking clouds just before the screenshot at the top of this section
This is an incredible start to a trailer. We’ve already got like six or seven things happening, most of which could be their own entire movie. And none of them are the point of this movie. They’re all just setting up the point of this movie. Again, incredible.
4. BODIES FLINGING ABOUT WILLY-NILLY
Let’s keep going with the bullet points:
- A stewardess tells everyone to fasten their seatbelts to prepare for turbulence
- Everyone fastens their seatbelt except for the stewardess
- WHO LAUNCHES INTO THE ROOF OF THE CABIN AS THE PLANE STARTS JOSTLING
- CHAOS
- SHOUTING
- A LADY GRIPPING THE WALL AND SCREAMING
Best part: We still have not reached the actual point of the movie, even though “mid-air chaos in an airplane flown by Gerard Butler that is carrying a murderer who makes lots of evil-type faces” is more than enough for an action movie. I know I’m repeating myself but this is too important to say just once. I’m so proud of everyone who had any part in making this happen.
3. The truly outrageous “well guess what, there are armed separatists now” twist
I’m just going to keep doing this in note form because I don’t think any paragraph can truly articulate what’s happening:
- The plane crashes in a jungle somewhere in Asia known as the “Jojo Cluster,” which would also be a great fake name if you’re looking for one
- It turns out the jungle is in some sort of ungovernable territory run by various separatists and armed militias
- Tony Goldwyn from Scandal and Ghost pops up to explain all of this through a chunk of helpful exposition delivered to a group of people in a boardroom
- The passengers are taken hostage and their only hope at survival is a rescue led by Gerard Butler (who appears to kick one dude in the face so hard the dude dies) and the convicted murdered played by Mike Colter (who Gerard uncuffs and might have been wrongly imprisoned and has a sledgehammer now)
That is what the movie is actually about. Which is… amazing. It’s like someone watched Air Force One and said “but what if we added a possible murderer and a bunch of guerrilla warfare”? Which is… I mean, good. Why do anything less than everything you can all at once, you know? I hope they get halfway through the movie and then there’s a surprise reveal that the island is also Jurassic Park. Let Gerard Butler kill a dinosaur. Or ride one to kill some militia guys. I can be flexible here.
2. This magical little bit of caption work
I don’t really have anything important to add to this bit of storytelling wizardry. Maybe just to remind you to always watch everything with the captions on. There’s so much gold in there to be mined and I can’t stand the thought of you missing any of it.
Moving on…
1. The thing where all of that is happening and the movie is just called Plane
One final collection of notes:
- It is deeply funny to me that all of this — murderers, plane crashes, armed separatists, jungle rescues — happens in a movie that is just called Plane
- It would be kind of like if Speed had been called Bus or if Titanic has been called Boat
- This would’ve been a great movie to slip in Dennis Hopper as like an evil senator who set the whole thing in motion for reasons that he explains in a long monologue at the beginning of the third act
- It’s even better because it appears from the trailer that less than half the movie takes place on the actual plane
- This movie could just as easily be called Jojo Cluster, which is an objectively better title
- I feel like you should know that Gerard Butler’s character is named Captain Brodie Torrance
This is all thrilling to me. I hope they make a dozen of them and each one starts with Gerard Butler crashing an airplane in a new lawless area of the word. Or even the moon. I need you to understand that I am serious about this. Please do it. For the people. For the world. But mostly for me.