Horizon Line

Horizon Line

source: Horizon Line

From the opening scenes you get a feeling that the set direction and acting is of very low quality, it had to have been the saddest and uninspiring bar scene ever made, and his apparent shed/home/work space, which was a shed with a few oxygen tanks thrown in, I think the cash was spent on CGI, well I must say, home PCs are very capable these days. They hook up on the island, she leaves, no real character development, she comes back for a wedding, runs into the guy again, share plane to another island where the pilot has a heart attack. Luckily she has had 2 pilot lessons and is able to keep the plane in the air. The fun starts here, where they perform aeronautical miracles, suspended the laws of physics as they traverse the outside of the plane, fixing fuel lines with sticky tape and replacing lost fuel with bottles of alcohol. Land on a sand bar, which becomes the ocean again at high tide, but they are rescued by a fishing boat. Pile of excrement, yes, but funny? Yes, I wanna watch this with some friends again and have a good belly laugh. From start to finish, it's an excellent example of cheap and nasty cookie cutter cinema, with some ridiculous surprises thrown in, thank me later.

Yep, if only the plane had simply crashed with all board and saved us all from having to suffer this piece of garbage. When will the Yanks learn how to make a decent, credible and intelligent thriller?

Big fan of Allison Williams. Movie was not perfect, and some stuff didn't make sense. But exciting at times. Enjoyed it.

Horizon Line feels like a one-line plot stretched into a 90-minute film with lead characters that have negligible chemistry between them and not worth caring much for. The only interesting thing about it is that one-line thread - stuck on a plane with the pilot dead. Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken previously wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane, a sci-fi thriller (with undertones of horror) that I enjoyed. But the advantage there was the underlying mystery and the solid lead performances. In the case of Horizon Line, we get neither. Keith David as the pilot who dies early on is the only character that showed some semblance of being likeable. The protagonists, played by Allison Williams and Alexander Dreymon, are total whatevers, without fleshed-out stories (or even a solid verbal reason) to back them up. This implies that the film completely relies on extracting tension due to their current situation alone (that of manoeuvring a plane to safety without a pilot). There's the fuel outage plot-point that drives most of the (outrageous) decisions and stunts in the film. The plot-point is used purely as a stress-inducing device because the characters can't have a regular conversation between them. The only few times they do, they mouth ridiculous lines like "Omg, that must have hurt so much. I can't believe I just did that!". When the performances lack panache, director Mikael Marcimain only has the technical aspects to retain viewer attention. Many of the green-screen shots embedded with CGI look a little off, especially the ones from the exterior of the plane. It's still a watchable fare; one that ought to be seen and forgotten.

Ridiculous characters. I just wanted the girl to stop talking, die, something other than flit from one scene to another like a manic, drunken freak. There's nothing likeable about her. Just let the plane go down and put us out of our misery. I couldn't make it through...shut it off just to stop hearing her freaking out constantly. Horrible acting.

A high-flying survival thriller with thrills and spills of the most preposterous nature, Horizon Line is an undeniably daft movie from start to finish, but still provides great entertainment among its most far-fetched moments. Though it starts poorly, the film takes the survival genre to a new level, with captivating action and tension right to the finish, although not quite enough to keep you on the edge of your seat throughout. First things first, if you're going into Horizon Line expecting a nail-biting, intense survival thriller that ranks among the genre's best, you're going to come out sorely disappointed. The film lacks the drama and emotional resonance of a great survival movie, but it does at least entertain with a whole heap of rapid-fire action. The film's opening act is undeniably weak, as it attempts to craft an emotional back story for the two characters that will ultimately find themselves fighting for survival thousands of feet in the air. Dragging on for far too long and never really stoking much of a sentimental beat, the first twenty or so minutes seem to last an eternity as you wait for some proper thrills and spills. However, once the fun stuff does get going, it gets going really quickly. The film's entire middle act is as far-fetched as can be, with two characters somehow able to survive in a plane without their pilot through what seems like the most ridiculous series of coincidences. But as preposterous as it is, the pacing and action make Horizon Line a whole lot of fun to watch. Despite the attempts at drama in its opening stages, once the film settles into its main action, you stop trying to take it seriously and instead enjoy it for the crazy adventure it really is. At times, suspension of disbelief is a challenge, particularly when the characters start hanging on the outside of the plane, but there's more than enough imagination in the film's screenplay to keep it an entertaining watch. You might find its finale a little bit of a cop-out after a really strong finish, but as far as an action-packed survival story goes, Horizon Line is perfectly good fun. Where the film struggles amidst all those thrills and spills, however, is in the relationship between its two main characters. After failing to really establish good drama in the first act, Horizon Line never manages to get you to fully sympathise with its two leads as they work together to stay alive up in the sky. The performances from Allison Williams and Alexander Dreymon too aren't fantastic, with moments of iffy line delivery and a little bit of a lack of chemistry, but most of all a real lack of genuine fear in either of their faces. Until the very last moments of the film, you'd be hard-pressed to know that the pair were in a life-or-death scenario, with both Williams and Dreymon smiling and laughing far too much throughout, and not putting on genuinely petrified facial expressions. The movie's high-wire action means that the emotional depth is less of a problem, but I felt like the two leads really weren't doing justice to the situation they're meant to be portraying. Maybe it's just me, but sitting in a plane above the open ocean without a pilot sounds as petrifying a situation as can be. Overall, though, I still liked Horizon Line. It's by no means a perfect movie, and struggles with a boring and ineffective opening act, ridiculous action, a lack of emotional depth and often disappointing performances from its leads. However, with fun-loving action, fast pacing and impressive visuals, the movie is an undeniably daft but enjoyable watch.

Does the movie have some silly parts, yes, but it entertained me for the full 1:30. Not every movie has to be an Oscar contender. Sometimes movies are just meant to be fun, silly, and take you to another place for 90 minutes. This accomplished that.

This was the second time in my long watching-movies-in-the-theater-career that I walked out from a movie before it ended. The storyline went from bad to worse and got more unrealistic every minute. So I was okay with not knowing how it would end and glad that I chose to save a little of my precious time on earth.