STARFLIGHT ONE
aka Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, and other titles
1983
Directed by Jerry Jameson
Written by Gene Warren, Peter R. Brooke, and Robert Malcolm Young
The Airport franchise, begun in 1970, had the luxury—even amidst the collapse of its genre—of ending more-or-less on its own terms, and while any film series that includes The Concorde: ...Airport '79 maybe doesn't entirely deserve such a description, I think of the franchise as the dignified and venerable core of its decade's disaster film cycle. Even Airport '79, whatever else, at least seemed to know it was time to hang it up after one last ride. But for my money, it peaked with its penultimate entry, Airport '77, a big hit and a fine film, directed by one Jerry Jameson, and any impartial observer would have had to have assumed this would have been Jameson's big career-making leap out of television movies; after a fashion, it was. It's perhaps unfortunate for Airport '79, and it is undeniably unfortunate for Jameson, that the Airport sequels' co-producer William Frye seems to have gotten custody of the director in the former's split from the Airport sequels' other co-producer, Jennings Lang, who didn't get Jameson but did get the actual franchise. Hence Airport '79 went without him, and hence it was that Jameson's next theatrical film, which should have confirmed him as a legitimate popcorn cinema fixture, was only the ungodly waste of 1980's Raise the Titanic. There's probably no need to weep for Jameson, because his television career remained successful, but he didn't make another film released in domestic theaters for another eighteen years, and to be honest I'm not completely sure that 1998's Land of the Free was a theatrical release.
But he did make the best Airport, and nobody can take that away from him. The secret twist is that I think a very reasonable case could be made that he somehow still made the best two Airports, and that brings us to today's subject, the 1983 telefilm Starflight One, which I believe aired under the title Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, but in its various international theatrical releases, notably Hungary and Japan, was marketed—I cannot say how lawfully!—as an actual Airport movie. (Real fans would've been outraged at the absence of Patroni, of course.) I'm especially fond of the title it operated under in Hungary: Airport 2000. Man, is that ever cool.
Coming so long after the heyday of disaster cinema on both the big and small screens, I cannot say what prompted Starflight One's creation under producer Arnold Orgolini, though he'd been a principal behind Meteor back in 1979, so maybe he just liked this stuff, and Meteor was such a hash that he felt he deserved another, less sprawlingly ambitious go at spaceborne disaster. Jameson was a natural choice to direct, and, for added authenticity, they acquired an actual Airport film composer, Lalo Schifrin, who accordingly delivers the best score of any of the numerous Jameson-directed disaster telefilms we've looked at recently, very Airportesque in its driving thrills with a touch of cosmic ethereality more befitting a celestial setting. (It should be made clear that I'm going to have almost nothing substantially bad to say about this film, which, arriving long after the contest and the appropriate decade had ended, is 100% the best 70s disaster telefilm I think they ever made.) What's wild is that arriving in 1983, Orgolini—and Jameson, and screenwriter Robert Malcolm Young, and maybe even the film's credited story originator Peter R. Brooke—had to have realized that they were just making the serious version of 1982's Airplane II: The Sequel, which took the whole "disaster... in space!" thing and made it ridiculous, part of its entire parodic strategy. I suppose they must have said, "yeah, that's exactly right, and why shouldn't we?"
So: what we have is the story of the Thornwell Aviation Corporation's Starflight, a simple hypersonic transport that accidentally becomes a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, which I'm sure is aeronautically bonkers and that's the least of it. The futuristic craft is about to make its maiden voyage from Los Angeles to Sydney—the proverbial three-hour tour—under the command of Captain Cody Briggs (Lee Majors), with a diverse passenger list that includes, most notably, the married captain's paramour, Thornwell Aviation PR flack and divorcee Erica Hansen (Lauren Hutton), as well as Hansen's sourpussed daughter Laurie (Heather McAdam). Also along for the ride are affable broadcast journalist Felix Duncan (Robert Webber); Thornwell electrical engineer Joe Pedowski (Pat Corley), who's afraid of flying and who entered an employee lottery for the maiden HST flight presumably as a way to conquer his fears; and radio operator Pete, no surname supplied (Michael Sacks), who wanted to be an astronaut as a child and will get his wish fulfilled in an extremely horrible way. Not all of these people are important yet, which is part of Starflight One's great disaster film charm, but important pretty much right away is Freddie Barrett (Terry Kiser), a Muskian figure, but less repellant, who does space telecommunications, and is taking the Starflight to Sydney to be present for the launch of a Delta carrying his new something-or-other, a make-or-break proposition for his company; when the flight is delayed for an hour, he gets on the horn to his man in Sydney, a sentient offensive Australian accent (Dublin-born actor Redmond Gleeson), and, when apprised that his launch may get delayed, too, he browbeats his underling into launching right now. This turns out to have been a bad idea because a fault in the rocket demands it be destructed, and for all intents and purposes what he's done is launch an ASAT missile at himself.
It's even worse than that, though, because the last highly important passenger, Starflight's own designer Josh Gilliam (Hal Linden), has unsuccessfully tried to get old man Q.T. Thornwell (Ray Milland), his more conscientious but more diffident son Martin (Gary Bayer), and his high-functioning sociopath lieutenant Bowdish (George DiCenzo) to postpone the flight over his inchoate fears, which center around the very real possibility that, well, he accidentally built a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, if the rockets are burned too long. This is precisely what happens when NASA directs Briggs to overfly the debris field and the burn gets stuck. Now oblivion awaits them all, life in space being impossible, as we know (and did I mention it's leaking air and took some control line damage during the debris storm? because of course it did), but through a whole series of desperate measures and a rescue mission or three flown up to the HST's decaying orbit by the space shuttle Columbia, there's a chance to get these 50-odd souls back to Earth.
What can't be helped is that this is silly, with enormous logistical problems inherent to keeping this story mobile and fun, of which the Columbia flying successive relief missions in a roughly two day period is only the most prominent. It's bugged me every time I've seen Starflight One and I have, indeed, yelled at the screen, "JUST USE ANOTHER SHUTTLE!", but I didn't realize till basically now that they were just playing the hand life gave them: the Columbia actually was the only shuttle in service at that point. But this is obviously the near-future—maybe not Airport 2000 literally, but I really don't think it's supposed to be 1983 on-the-dot—and they at least knew that Challenger was entering service more-or-less presently. The screenplay is very sensitive on the subject, even so, with a lot of anxious lines about how "it's a good thing we've learned how to turn 'em around quick!", but quick would be, like, two weeks. And then they do go and use another shuttle, a USAF shuttle that's never existed outside of paranoid Soviet nightmares, and this winds up being the most unattractive part of the movie's manufacture anyway, possibly interpolated in at the last minute because of those aforementioned anxieties, because the actors reciting the dialogue about it stumble over their lines to keep referring to it as Columbia. Hey, they're stressed, they're rattled, give the guys a break, I guess.
Amusingly, at least some of the stock footage is of freaking Enterprise, and not much is helped by any of the stock footage here, except Orgolini's pocketbook, and it can jar mightily with the actual special effects, which, it turns out, can jar just about as much between themselves; this is the part where we discuss the look of this TV movie, and mostly, I'd say it does credit to its form. Jameson is managing his locations well, as had by this point become something of the filmmaker's greatest strength, making use of some extravagantly tacky "future of the past" facilities, like the red-and-pink airport and Thornwell's blue-and-yellow glass control room—I adore this control room, with these ridiculous oversized support columns strung along through it, and these absurdly steroidal door handles on the glass entrances—as well as somewhat more tasteful spaces, like the "NASA" base (I think it's an air controller station, so it does still have a great deal of physical heft), and I'm especially taken by a pensive shot of Linden, the insignificance he's feeling emphasized by the sheer enormity of an open airplane hangar that has the added benefit of finding him crossing from stark light into pitch darkness.
On the other hand, the effects: they hired ILM alum John Dykstra, and this is simply not something you want compared against Star Wars. It is remarkably variable, but a key juxtaposition is the hazy, tactile stock footage of the Delta and the "Starflight" rising towards the heavens; the latter might be literally just an unmoving matte painting with uninspiring effects animation for its rocket. (The closeups we get of the damaged section of the plane wobble between a miniature with real sparks and what is absolutely a matte painting with what might as well be negative scratches for the electricity zapping out of it.) An awful lot of this feels like a well-heeled 1950s spaceflight movie, and that has undeniable charms, but it's not good for 1983 nor good for weighty thrills. And then it'll suddenly, if intermittently, improve, and it's still not good for a 1983 theatrical film, but it has some really loveable imagery anyway, with the composited elements of the Starflight, Columbia, and the Earth all moving, the former two rotating in concert while flying away from the camera in ways that are, compositionally at least, very beautiful. But the abiding mode really might be, like, a George Pal movie (and doesn't always hit that mark: the takeoff looks plain terrible), and it doesn't help the film transcend its silliness.
It can stand to be silly, anyway. I'll spare a little discussion of the human dimension of Starflight One, which is muted but largely decent, and Jameson and his writers are so on guard against it getting in the way that it's almost a tangible force how little they care about pursuing this melodrama against their disaster film backdrop. There's the matter of how our villainous telecommunicator is never even discovered, which I don't even mind, personally, and frankly we get what we need out of a few insert shots of Kiser looking guilty; there's the matter of how functionally-important characters are set up early, or not even set up at all, and only become crucial to the plot 100 minutes later, which I actually like, as this tends to add to the realism of the scenario rather than detract from it; and there's the matter of Thornwell's own capitalist venality, which feels like it's a theme the movie knows it's supposed to have, so Milland's peremptory captain of industry comes off somewhat inorganic, with Kiser's character being a constant reminder that, actually, the plane did work, and it was mainly this other asshole's fault.
Then there's daughter Laurie, whom the movie has categorically not one use for, except to be a figure who has a motivation to criticize Hansen for having an affair with a married man, which the script has Hansen shut down immediately, with so much finality that I'm not entirely sure that the kid gets more than three lines afterwards, and only about three subsequent scenes where she's even with her mom (as they, you know... face death), insofar as Hutton is way too busy sharing scenes with Majors on account of said affair. It's not handled flawlessly, obviously (by the same token the movie's already 115 minutes and I don't know if we have an affirmative need for 10 more dealing with the world's most obvious emotional beats and a child actor), but I do like this, too: the whole "dude, fuck that" riposte to every TV disaster movie cliche (including Jerry Jameson TV disaster movie cliches) about spouses reuniting. Hell, they might even be sneering at Airplane!, and it represents a return all the way back to the original Airport itself, and harder-nosed 70s ideas about marriage, effectively saying "life is short, as our current situation makes exceedingly clear, so maybe you don't need to spend it with someone you can't stand anymore (Tess Harper)." It's not superb melodrama, but Hutton and Majors here have solid-enough chemistry; as for Majors, he's not burning up the screen as a capital-A Actor, but this being my first significant exposure to the man, I now understand why he had such a long and august career, because he's just fun to look at, with his adorable smug squinting and general eyebrow gymnastics. The best performance in the film, anyhow, belongs to Corley, whose schlub-called-to-heroism turn in the final act* is strikingly lived-in—he's about ten seconds away from crying—though it's fit to the purposes of what is, at the end of the day, still a matinee adventure.
So, mostly, it is just about its plot, and the disaster modules that comprise it, and Jameson and the screenplay are approaching it pretty slyly, with an absolute straight face, which never varies even after the hour mark, when the movie really kicks in. I don't know how much it's "the Jameson touch," because he didn't write either film, but it's noticeable that Airport '77 solved that franchise's conceptual problem of an all-or-nothing disaster by turning an airplane crash into a maritime crisis, and this film does essentially the same thing, just in its different setting. That means that in this "airplane" disaster film we still get the rescue attempts that go bad, with fatal consequences, and the film can manage a wonderful disaster flick escalation. Moreover, because it's space they start getting weird, at first in the expected ways, like when the radio operator "becomes an astronaut," sans helmet, but then that turn at the hour mark I mentioned happens, and the strategies our heroes come up with become, shall we say, idiosyncratic. (Albeit also mediated through way more "what did you just say?/you're a genius!" screenwriting than is remotely healthy.)
Already the film's doing a solid job vis-a-vis "space": I appreciate what Jameson and cinematographer Hector R. Figueroa are doing to make this feel "spacey" (at least on a telefilm schedule), minding how the hard light of an unshielded sun looks distinctive, and with a thoughtful consistent movement to the camera aboard the Starflight that gives the space scenes a "floaty" sensation. It's a cheap trick, but an effective one, confirmed by the zero-g wirework that, obviously, is not going to be done rigorously—this TV movie from 1983 was not shot inside a plummetting 747, or on a greenscreen, I'm afraid—but it's insisted upon enough, especially early on, to give the proceedings more than enough credibility to get by, and a really distinctive texture from every other disaster film of its era to boot. It's a little more credible, inevitably, in SD—in HD the wires are patently visible—and this is where I mention that Starflight One's Code Red/Kino Lorber blu-ray is an enormous disappointment; besides some concerns about its color timing, it's framed in its theatrical ratio, when it's extremely obvious that Jameson was composing for TV. (A properly-framed version is on Amazon Prime, for the curious.)
But the second hour of the movie is about disaster film ideas that it invariably presents with the utmost gravity, but with giddy underlying wackiness, and that's where Starflight One soars. With tense breathers in between, we get setpiece after setpiece, especially Gilliam's solo absconsion from the plane to the shuttle (they need the designer's expertise on the ground, for reasons), involving an element that, when it was first introduced, seemed like merely a plot device to delay the Starflight's takeoff. It turns out to be the ghoulish means by which we get what I presume must be the signature scene of the whole film, involving a corpse decked out for his own funeral, floating around in zero-g because they really need his coffin for a space capsule instead. Subsequently, we get gold bars flying off into the ether, space welding, and the trippy, outright op-art visual of a big-ass orange accordion tube tied between the accidental spaceship and the shuttle, with Jameson's extras either having a great time or a terrible time as they tumble their way down the unstable chute. The thing, then, is that Starflight One is a genuinely imaginative good time—not truly great, maybe, but I suspect it's a movie that I'll come back to whenever I'm feeling the itch for something unique.
Score: 7/10
*I am not, however, too keen on Brigg's insistence that the hospitality staff, that is, the stewardesses (not that I'd feel different if they were stewards) are likewise honorbound to die alongside him and the command crew.
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