RogerBW's Blog

2020, dir. Roseanne Liang, Chloë Grace Moretz, Taylor John Smith: IMDb / allmovie. In 1943, Flight Office Maude Garrett boards a B-17 that's ferrying from Auckland to Samoa, with secret orders and a mysterious package. But she's not the only unexpected passenger on this flight.

Although it tries to look realistic at first with its dark and fogbound airfield, this is an unabashedly pulpy film. When you're climbing around the outside of an aeroplane that's doing 200mph, that doesn't manifest itself as your hair decoratively waving around in the breeze every few seconds. (And constantly vocalising "aah aah aah" noises doesn't really help.) But then our heroine falls out of the plane and onto an exploding enemy aircraft, and is blown straight back into the hole where the turret used to be, landing unharmed, so clearly realism has left the building. OK. I can work with that.

But the real difficulty for me is in the plotting. Yes, all right, the point of the plot is to put a woman on board the plane in this WWII film. But the problem, well, all right, spoilers. (rot13.com may help, if you're reading somewhere that doesn't already support this.)

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What we get in practice is more than half the film being a one-actor show, as Maude is stuck in the ventral turret listening to a constant barrage of sexist crap from the crew while they ignore what she's saying. (Why yes, Max Landis did write the first draft of the script before he got thrown off the project.) That's a very demanding acting job, and Moretz isn't quite up to making it interesting to watch. Then in the second half she turns into Superwoman, the only person able to fight the beast effectively… and why is that? Because she's an élite operative? Because she's had a briefing on these things? No, it's abguvat zber guna gur cbjre bs zbgureubbq.

I really liked the look of this from the trailer, because unlike many classic aircraft war films that were restricted to a few shooting angles the crew could use modern cameras and CGI to give a sense of place inside the aircraft; there are plenty of shots with people running fore and aft and you have some idea of where things are relative to each other. But then I saw this bit.

Looking at the stuff inside the circle: the top part is the underside of the wing with smoke coming off it, and that is flowing to the right of the frame. So this is the starboard wing (the plane is not flying backwards). But that long narrow blur is a propeller mounted on the right-hand edge of the wing, the edge we can see – i.e. on the trailing edge. And this is meant to be a B-17, which does not have propellers there. The film's trying to give us that sense of place, of being able to say that this is near that and these bits are in between, but it's specifically the viewer who's taking it at its word and trying to assemble an idea of the layout of the thing who will be thrown by shots like that.

And since the crew's attitudes are binary – either "the woman is wrong, whatever she says or does" or "the woman is right, whatever she says or does" – there isn't even a whole lot of genuinely feminist content here, except insofar as Maude is ultimately the instrument of her own salvation. Which I suppose is better than nothing.

In the end there are some enjoyable bits, and in particular the film does a fine job of keeping up the tension, but there's also a constant grating sensation of things being slightly wrong. Oh well. The trailer has most of the good stuff. The end credits show clips of real RAF and USAAF airwomen, and I couldn't help thinking that I'd rather have been watching a film about them.