Flightplan

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Jodie Foster must have some kind of nightmares. She played a rape victim in "The Accused," a woman under siege in "Panic Room," and now a woman whose daughter disappears on a transatlantic flight . . . and is told by the flight staff that the girl was never on board, and may, in fact, never have existed.

WHAT?

But that's the unlikely premise of "Flightplan," a pretty effective thriller that serves as a showcase for Foster's considerable talents--especially her ability to play a woman who's emotionally troubled, rattled, and paranoid. Foster is in her element as Kyle Pratt, a jet-propulsion engineer based in Berlin who's taking her daughter and her husband's coffin back to New York. Pratt is trying hard to keep it together after being told her husband leapt to his death. It gets worse. On a double-decker Aalto E-474 jumbo jet (whose engines she coincidentally helped design) her six-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston) disappears while mom falls asleep three hours into the flight. She asks passengers and flight attendants about the girl, but it turns out that no one has seen her. In fact, no one saw the girl at all, and flight attendants eventually tell her that the girl doesn't even show up on their flight register, and there's no record of her having boarded the plane in Berlin.

And so the stage is set for a psychological thriller. Was there a little girl, or is she a delusion of a grief-stricken woman? The story, as it turns out, is based on a real incident. Apparently a businessman's son disappeared on an international flight. Originally, the screenplay involved terrorists hijacking the plane and a male protagonist, but director Robert Schwentke says on an excellent commentary track that they rewrote the script when Foster came onboard and realized that there were things they could do with a woman in the same situation that they couldn't with a man. As in "Panic Room," Foster once again finds herself in a confined space. But this time, the people who are threatening her are right inside that fuselage with her.

Schwentke really sets up this thriller well by shooting scenes from Kyle's grief-stricken point of view. Because her mental state is called into question, we end up wondering, as the flight attendants do, what is real and what is all in a disturbed woman's mind. Because we see things from Kyle's point of view we also see how she could become suspicious of crew members and passengers. There's even a credible balancing act that Schwentke pulls off when it comes to a possible protagonist. Who's really on Kyle's side? Is it the captain of the plane (Sean Bean), or an air marshal named Carson (Peter Sarsgaard). Just as it happened in "Panic Room," there's a rhythm of heavy-breathing and confinement that alternates with periods of rapid camera movement and frantic action. So much depends on pacing and character development in a film like this, but everything comes together nicely. The result is a taut little thriller that holds your attention until the surprising end.

Of course, the real suspect of any thriller is usually the plot itself, if you question the logic too much. You can't be overly scrutinous about "Flightplan" or you'll ruin the ride. Just go along with the premise and don't sweat the small stuff. Ignore, for example, unanswered questions about two Arabic men who face post-9/11 scrutiny, and just deal with Kyle turning into a one-person wrecking crew near the end. After all, if Harrison Ford can do it in "Air Force One," why not a woman? If someone told you your daughter never existed, you'd want to take apart the plane, too.



A five-part "making of" feature covers the writing, directing, casting, post-production, and visual effects, with Schwentke and others telling how they got a behind-the-scenes tour of a 747 at Los Angeles International. On "Designing the Aalto E-474" we get even more details about how this huge and complicated set was built. At LAX they saw things like the attic, the holds, and the nose cone of the 747, and then they "expanded it exponentially" to create a jet-set that looks so huge and intricate that it could pass for a ||Star Wars|m|1697|| spaceship. But we also marvel at how tight and constrictive the set was. Anyone who thinks acting is easy needs to watch these features, which show Foster managing to hold her concentration even as men with cameras spin around her on dolly tracks while she's delivering her monologues. The audio commentary by Schwentke isn't as good, because it covers many of the same bases, but it's still worth a listen. So is the DTS soundtrack option. It puts the rumble in this thriller.

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