There's no mistaking this for anything other than the 1984 made-for-television docudrama that it is. The opening scenes begin with the major characters waking up in their several beds and establishing their characteristics at once.
The first beautiful non-actress who, like all the others, sports a Farrah Fawcett do, is a month or two pregnant and her husband pulls her to the bed and presses his ear against her still trim belly, all smiles, listening for the heartbeat. "I wish we could have it right away," he murmurs. "Mm-mm. I want to feel every kick." If that isn't revolting, what is?
How about this? Beautiful non-actress Number Two actually HAS a baby and she's cuddling it in her arms, while her mother's eyes pop with delight and she exclaims, "I still can't believe it! My own little Priscilla with her own BABY!" The husband, Carlos, appears, darkly handsome, wearing a leisure suit and a happy grin. He kisses Grandma. He kisses his wife. He kisses his baby. And he never once loses that GRIN while doing it!
References to pregnancy and babies keep showing up throughout the film, like symptoms of smoldering myeloma. After the crash (unseen, no CGIs) Priscilla surfaces among the ice floes screaming, "My BABY, give me my BABY!" But the writers aren't done squeezing juice out of it yet.
-- Okay. I'm back. Even thinking of these scenes required a brief trip to the portable bar. You know. There is "happiness" and then there is a "blandness" that tries for a complete clouding of the sensorium. It reaches for the stars. There's more dialog, some evidently intended to be funny. Aboard the doomed, icy airplane, a man says, "I finally got me a window seat and now I can't see out of it." Everyone in hearing distance laughs.
Anyway, in another pre-crash scene, the handsome young boyfriend brings home breakfast for his beautiful young non-actress partner -- "Jelly donuts? Prune Danish?" She's wearing a neon blue one-piece swimsuit, getting ready for their destination, Florida, and replies with a happy smile, "One more of those and I won't be able to get into this." That would be okay, though, because I imagine she'd look pretty good without it.
This particular couple adds a darker dimension to the movie though. They're not married. He wants to get married but she's not ready yet because her star is rising. (This is known as the career-love conflict.) And all of this generates the suspicion that this couple has been having sexual congress -- OUTSIDE THE BOUNDS OF HOLY MATRIMONY! What else do they do -- smoke WEED? Vote DEMOCRATIC? Is there no end to their perfidy?
The parade of introductions continues. Richard Mazur, like all the others, lives in a neat middle-class home in Virginia, has a wife and a cute little shaggy dog with whom he holds conversations. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with chatting with your dog. I once found myself apologizing to live clams as I dropped them one by one in boiling water. But this dog seems to understand Mazur. If he says, "Don't look at me like that," the dog looks away. I never expected absolution from those clams. That reminds me of an old joke. What does a clam say to the postman? Correct -- nothing.
I remember seeing clips of this horrible accident on the evening news, in particular, one fellow leaping into the ice-choked Potomac and rescuing a stewardess who was in the process of drowning. (That's an operational definition of altruism.) This movie is one hour and thirty minutes long. It takes twenty-three minutes and forty-six seconds to accurately predict who that heroic man is going to be.
The dialog continues in this vein. While shivering among the ice floes, the knot of survivors begins saying the Lord's Prayer but not the version I learned as a kid. "Trespasses" has been changed to "debts," presumably because few know what "trespass" means as a noun, while everyone knows what "debt" means. Meanwhile, back at the Listerian-clean ranch house, Grandma has learned of the disaster, hurries to the TV and, watching the attempts at rescue, shrieks at the screen: "Swim, Priscilla, SWIM!" This time around, the silliness has turned amusing. It's the equivalent of the handful of castaways, waving and shouting at the distant and indifferent search plane: "We're over HERE!"
But why go on? This is a meretricious piece of exploitative trash. The genuine suffering and deaths have been instrumentalized as money-making machines. The performances take place in a straight jacket and the direction is clumsy beyond belief. If you're looking for a good disaster, you've found it.
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