Directed by: David Lowell Rich
Music by: Lalo Schifrin
Starring: George Kennedy, Alain Delon, Eddie Albert, Robert Wagner
MPAA rating: PG
My Rating: 1 out of 10
One word can explain this movie to all interested viewers: stupid. This movie is truly not worth your time to watch. The layout of the film is sporadic and hard to follow, morality is just about non-existent, and the dialogue is just plain stupid. I, for one, know that it is going to be a very long time before I will even consider watching this movie again.
Airport ’79 begins with the inaugural flight of the new Concorde Supersonic airliner flying from Washington D.C. to Paris to Moscow. Piloted by the now-legendary Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) and France’s best pilot Paul Metrand (Alain Delon), and with the airline’s owner (Eddie Albert) aboard, the plane sets off on it’s historic flight. However, the Concorde also has documents aboard incriminating an arms manufacturer (Robert Wagner) as a Communist spy. Determined to save himself, Wagner uses all weapons at his disposal to bring down the Concorde as it flies towards Moscow. Nuclear missiles and fighter jets set out to bring the plane down over the Atlantic, and another Communist spy unlatches the cargo door so as to depressurize the plane. Patroni and Metrand subsequently have to undertake some very evasive maneuvers and make some radical decisions in order to try and save the plane and its passengers before it breaks up and goes down.
As in the previous two sequels Airport 1975 and Airport ’77, the plot has promise, is doable and could have made a great movie. What absolutely ruins it however is just the way the film was put together. The quality of the picture is good but is harmed immensely by the newsreel shots which are obviously taken from some low-profile TV station of the late 70s/ early 80s. The special effects, though spectacular, are obviously computer generated which hurts pretty bad. The dialogue is hard to follow, full of bad language, and contains several unacceptable references. Finally, to top it all off, the ending is completely random and has no influence whatsoever on the movie. I still remember seeing the ending shot and thinking: “Huh?”
To sum it up, this movie is just plain stupid and I recommend you invest your time more wisely. This movie did mark the end of the heyday of the disaster movie and I can see why. The genre had just burned itself out by this point, and they were ready to move on to the next big thing in film-making. That also happens to be where I am headed, for now I shall leave the disaster movies behind.
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