China Eastern didn’t exactly have a huge movie library, but there were still a few flicks there I hadn’t previously seen. So I watched them in the worst possible ambience, and wrote about it.
All of these films were watchedI watched all of these films inflight on China Eastern in December 2023- I wrote about the overall experience here. There wasn’t a huge selection of movies in English, so I took what I could get.
Fast X (Fast and Furious X) (M)
Titled “Fast X” because “Fast and Furious” has too many syllables for the series’ fans, this is actually the 11th movie in the series including the spinoff Hobbs And Shaw. Over time the series has morphed from “illegal street racers who occasionally commit crimes” to “Mission: Impossible black-ops with muscle cars”, even lampshading how silly the whole premise is.
“If it could be done in a car, they did it. [Dom] violates the laws of God and gravity.”
Aimes (Alan Ritchson)
For Fast X, we immediately return to the ending of Fast Five, a movie I also saw while stuck on a long-haul flight. Our heroes/villains/family have managed to steal and subsequently tow a bank vault (without wheels) through the streets of Rio De Janeiro. Retrospectively, the Big Bad from that film had a son, Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), and the loss of his family spurs him to target Dom (Vin Diesel) and his clan of kind-of-criminals-except-when-the-plot-demands.
Cue a series of increasingly unlikely set pieces. A 3-metre-wide spherical nuclear bomb bounces through central Rome, obliterating solid stone and metal obstacles, then detonates without any fallout or apparent loss of life? Check. A character escapes a confrontation with a glider (!) hidden in the cargo hold (!!) of a passenger jet that somehow has a bomb bay (?!)? You betcha. Dom says “family” a lot and drives a muscle car that apparently has 44 gears judging by how many times he shifts up? Of course. Every single living character from the previous films gets a cameo to set up another plot thread? Oh yes.
Indeed, we can’t tie up those plot threads in a three-hour flick, and its extremely sudden ending with its characters scattered all over the globe lets you know that a Fast XI is surely on the way. There’s even one more character who gets to make their entrance in the middle of the credits. At least we’re going to get more of Momoa’s delightfully demented take on Dante; he’s basically playing a Batman villain and is completely unhinged, in stark contrast to Vin Diesel mumbling about family and staring intently through his windscreen. I look forward to watching the actual conclusion to this on a flight in five years’ time.
Interstellar (M)
Side note: Unlike Fast X, which seems determined to give you the entire plot and show off all the set pieces in the trailer, Interstellar manages to not spoil the movie- indeed, nothing from the second half of the film appears in the trailer at all. I admire the studio’s restraint (or more likely, the determination of director Christopher Nolan, digging his heels in when the trailer was cut).
From a critical perspective, watching a film that won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects on a nine-inch airline screen surrounded by engine noise is bordering on heresy. But I hadn’t seen it, and there wasn’t much else in English, so here we are.
Retired astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) think they’re receiving signals from outer space; the co-ordinates they receive lead them to a NASA installation. Thought to be defunct, NASA is operating in secret and is setting up a mission to find new planets on which mankind can set up colonies and move away from an increasingly-hostile Earth; Cooper joins scientist Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and other astronauts on their mission. This summary sounds spoilery, but it barely covers the first act- I guarantee you there’s an awful lot of story left to be told once our explorers actually suit up.
This is definitely one to watch on the big screen- the space sequences are amazing and the scope of what our intrepid explorers face really needs the theatrical experience. That said, it’s an extraordinary film and I don’t know if I could go back and rewatch it again quite so soon… maybe once I’ve had more time to digest it. But it’s absolutely worth a look.
Detective Chinatown 3 (唐人街探案 3) (M)
I got a bit lucky on this one as I noticed one of my seatmates watching it and discovered it had English subtitles- and it turns out to be one of the biggest Chinese movies of 2021. Wikipedia lists it as the sixth highest-grossing non-English-language flick of all time, and its opening weekend apparently grossed more money than Avengers: Endgame in China.
Wang Baoqiang and Liu Haoran play private investigators arriving in Tokyo to investigate a murder- specifically to defend a local mob boss against murder accusations. Along the way they are aided by a local Japanese gumshoe (Satoshi Tsumabuki), alternately aided and hindered by a competing Thai detective (Tony Jaa), impeded by the local police force, and confronted by Q, the leader of a shadowy group with a specific interest in Liu’s character…
Most of the film is played as slapstick and it has an odd gimmick where the characters all speak their own languages (except the Thai cop, who speaks English); a Babel Fish-style translating earpiece is used to handwave away the language barrier. It’s slightly let down by an ending that comes a little bit out of the blue and doesn’t fit with the lighter tone of the rest of the film; but it does set up a Detective Chinatown 4 and the ride is enjoyable enough that I might seek out the earlier flicks.
John Wick Chapter 4 (MA15)
This is slightly cheating- I managed to crash the inflight entertainment system on the flight home using the nefarious technique of “picking a movie in Chinese at random”. So through the wonders of subscription streaming services, I had John Wick Chapter 4 downloaded on my tablet, ready to go.
The eponymous hero (Keanu Reeves) is still on the run from the mysterious High Table, who are determined to hunt him down by targeting everyone who has helped him so far. Under the orders of the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), the New York Continental hotel is destroyed, and the next target on the list is the Osaka branch; from there John’s path intertwines with two assassins (Donnie Yen and Shamier Anderson) who have millions of reasons to kill him, but might also have their motivations to assist him when convenient.
The John Wick series can be summed up as “rubbish, but lovingly, painstakingly filmed”; while the lore has been greatly expanded over the series, it’s still all about the fight sequences, and Chapter 4 is brutal. The longest film in the series, Chapter 4 has guns, swords, fists, cars, sumo, and the occasional dog, and by the time John is heading up a (very long) set of stairs to the movie’s climax, you’ll be feeling just as out of breath as he is. It even seems like Keanu deliberately gets almost no dialogue in the movie, knowing full well that he’ll need every ounce of energy to get through the next fight scene.
But yeah. It’s John Wick. What’s not to like?
[…] If you do get audio working, you run into the second issue: the library is pretty threadbare. There are a total of 16 movies in the ‘Hollywood’ section and a grand total of just 1 (!) in the ‘Asian’ section- a Bollywood film. The only movie included in the library that had been released in the last twelve months was Fast and Furious X; if you’re feeling generous you could include 2022’s Puss In Boots: The Last Wish as relatively recent. At least the category has a few well-received movies, including critical darlings like Green Book, although a 9-inch airline screen with awful headphones is hardly the best way to watch, say, Interstellar. (I did try, though.) […]