Have Kitsch, Will Travel

This feels like one big dream," says a weary American woman to her husband, as they sit on a plane flying home. "Yeah," he enthuses, "but what a dream." Little do they know the plane will soon be forced to attempt an emergency landing. And little would an unenlightened audience suspect that it's watching a mainland Chinese film.

This is far from ordinary mainland movie fare. Shot on a scale few Asian filmmakers have attempted, China's first disaster picture, Crash Landing, assumes a Bruckheimeresque bravura. Modeled loosely on the 1970 disaster epic Airport, this reworking and its often realistic digital effects suggest China's sense of cinema as solid commercial entertainment has arrived. The film is a wake-up call to the country's domestic industry and should set alarm bells ringing in the rest of the world.

Director Zhang Jianya dispenses with the disaster-epic formula, refusing to spoon-feed the audience the age, inside-leg measurement and pet preference of each character prior to the action. Instead, he lingers only for an aperitif with the two main players, who happen to be locked in a rocky marriage: air hostess Qiu Yehua (Xu Fan), on her last flight after 10 years of service, and her pilot husband Li (Shao Bing), so smooth he looks like he has taken time off from his day job as James Bond. Both board the same Shanghai to Beijing flight. With that established in a couple of gulps, Zhang sets his camera firmly on the ground. In one kitsch-glorious shot (there are many in the film), the stewardesses stride across the tarmac as the pilots proudly await. We get close-up head shots and slow-mo: a collective cut-and-paste of every MTV-Bruckheimer gimmick served up in a few flickering seconds.

Then it's down to business. The plane takes off and Li discovers the landing gear won't lower: the plot develops from this seemingly minor detail. The crew wrestles with the mechanism for 10 minutes before the plane is ordered to turn back with only two hours' worth of fuel and 137 passengers on board. On the ground in Beijing, controller Liu Yuan (You Yong) arrives, chain-smokes, swigs coffee and looks suitably tormented. Prodded by Liu, the pilot tries multiple maneuvers, including a touch-and-go landing to bounce the apparatus down, and a manual release of the landing gear by a co-pilot who climbs down onto the wheels. An hour into the drama, Liu orders an emergency forced landing—the Chinese title of the film.

To vary the pace, Zhang tosses in some special effects as impressive as anything in Die Hard 2. When controller Liu tells airport authorities what would happen if the forced landing goes wrong, we view a wrenching simulation: the plane nose-dives into the tarmac and doesn't stop until it has ripped through a row of other planes and terminal buildings. By resisting the predictable, Zhang has rewritten the rules. Crash Landing is one giant leap for Chinese cinema. If you think you know China and you think you know movies, see it and think again.