[yasr_overall_rating]
Two strangers’ lives become inextricably bound together after a devastating plane crash.
For an actor who has spent the best part of 35 years playing tough macho guys, Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to be turning his career around nicely. After his stint as Governor of California, he jumped right back into movies but as he fast approaches his 70th birthday this year, it’s quite obvious that his tough-guy persona will have to give way for less physical and more dramatic roles and if you think he’s not up to the challenge, go back and watch 2002’s criminally underrated “Collateral Damage.” While the movie takes us back to Schwarzeneggers’ heyday as an action hero, in the opening scene, after his wife and young son are killed by a terrorist’s bomb, we see his grief and suffering and it actually brought tears to my eyes and made me realize that there was more to him than just brawn. And let’s not forget 2015’s “Maggie,” where director Henry Hobson took a horror film, about a young girl who becomes infected with a disease which slowly turns her into a zombie, and turned it on its heels by adding Schwarzenegger as her father, who defies the government’s warnings that she remain quarantined, and chooses to stay with her right up until the very end. Dramatic indeed.
With “Aftermath,” Schwarzenegger, once again, chooses a project that is filled with raw emotion and poignancy, as he plays the part of Roman, a construction worker who is waiting for his wife and daughter to return from a trip to Europe, just in time for Christmas, only to be informed by airport officials, that their flight was involved in a terrible mid-air collision with another plane. Adding even more weight to the story, is Scoot McNairy, who plays the part of Jake, the air traffic controller on duty when the accident transpires. As both men deal with the loss of life, Jake sinks into a depression that pushes his wife Christina (Maggie Grace) and young son further and further away from him. Racked with guilt that his actions cost the lives of hundreds of people, he contemplates suicide, before his company offers to have him transferred out of state with a new identity, job, and home, to avoid all the negativity being brought against them. At the same time, Roman tries to come to terms with his own loss, but when word leaks that Jake was the air traffic controller responsible for the crash, Roman finally has a new mission, to track down and face the man who took his family from him.
The film is based on the real-life events of the 2002 Überlingen mid-air collision, in which Danish air traffic controller Peter Nielsen was murdered by Russian architect Vitaly Kaloyev, whom he held responsible for the deaths of his family, but the movie itself, while not short on tragedy and a gut-wrenching narrative, is let down by a predictable and disconcerted finale. When dealing with films that are based on real-life events, many times the filmmakers will take creative license and change aspects of it around, to suit their story. We see early on that while the crash did indeed occur while Jake was on duty that fateful night, he was not solely responsible. With electricians in the tower, working on the phone lines, and Jake’s other colleagues away from their stations, he had more bases to cover than on any other normal night. With a bad storm moving in, Jake is left to go between guiding incoming planes to their designated runways while also trying to reach another nearby airport to inform them of a plane that has been diverted their way. We clearly see that the crash did not occur because he was inattentive, but rather, because he was doing the job of several people, trying to multi-task different functions in an environment where concentrating on more than one objective is prohibited.
The build-up to the inevitable conclusion falls short as Roman succumbs to his most basic desire, and the one thing that has been fuelling him since the night of the crash: revenge. He kills Jake, in front of his wife and son, and ends up going to prison for a long time. Because the story was so intriguing and captivating from the very beginning, the ending felt out of place and more suited to one of Schwarzenegger’s earlier action pieces, where after killing Jake he would have exclaimed, “Your air miles have expired!” A more suitable outcome, would have had Roman come to Jake’s apartment while he was alone, and while trying to bring himself to kill him, Jake would break down and apologize for what happened and in that moment, Roman would clearly see that it wasn’t a ruse, but that he was genuinely sorry for what happened. That is what I was waiting for so you can imagine my surprise when it wrapped up very unsatisfactorily. Schwarzenegger and McNairy bring gravitas and pathos to their respective roles, allowing you to see both characters dealing with their grief uniformly. On the night of the crash, when both planes on his monitor simply disappear, Jake hopes that it is just a glitch but later when he is informed of the gravity of the situation, he breaks down crying like a little boy and my heart immediately went out to him. Maggie Grace turns up as Jake’s long-suffering wife and does fine in her role but this film belongs squarely to Schwarzenegger and McNairy, each blazing their way across the screen, their paths on a collision course with each other, much like the unsuspecting planes.
Now playing in theaters and On Demand
