{"id":2398,"date":"2025-08-20T00:49:04","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T00:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/08\/20\/what-airplane-movies-can-teach-us-about-ourselves\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T00:49:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T00:49:07","slug":"what-airplane-movies-can-teach-us-about-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/08\/20\/what-airplane-movies-can-teach-us-about-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"What airplane movies can teach us about ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>This past weekend, I slid into an assigned seat on what I think was the biggest airplane I have ever been on. Stuck between a window and a stranger for a flight over the Atlantic, I decided to seize the moment to do what is probably only acceptable 40,000 feet in the sky \u2014 watch movies for eight hours straight. But something happens when you\u2019re crammed into a dark box, stuck staring at a screen. Maybe it\u2019s the five stages of grief; maybe it\u2019s Stockholm syndrome. You start to question the lull you find yourself in and the movies that put you there. Are the options hand-picked by Delta part of some psy-op? Are they purposely designed to be insanity-inducingly average? As I sit here on yet another flight (a cool four hours), unable to bring myself to select yet another movie from their lacking options, it might be time to unpack the art of selecting an in-flight movie, an art I\u2019ve based on the four movies I watched on my trek across the Atlantic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>The re-evaluated classic<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Coming back from my 7-week trip <a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/statement\/scotland-and-the-mythology-of-age\/\">abroad<\/a>, I definitely wanted something that felt like home. The first movie I cued up was something that I hadn\u2019t seen in a long time, \u201cThe Princess Bride.\u201d I know what you\u2019re thinking: \u201cI love that movie!\u201d But sitting there, watching Wesley beat the Rodent Of Unusual Size to death while Buttercup just stood there and watched, I was pissed. It\u2019s a great movie \u2014 funny, charming and quotable. But Buttercup is, like, super annoying. I know it\u2019s true love, but if I\u2019m ever that depressed over a guy, you have permission to knock me over the head and use me to start a war with Florin. Seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Complaints aside, being suspended in the air with nowhere else to go is the perfect place to grapple with movies you watched growing up and want a fresh set of eyes on. I\u2019d also throw any romantic comedy watch in this category. I know I\u2019ve seen \u201cThe Proposal\u201d in the Delta library before, and some of you need to watch that one with the type of critical thinking that only being isolated in a metal tube without access to Letterboxd comments can provide. Free yourself from the internet\u2019s opinions! Make the most of the limited time to unplug.\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-1    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><strong>The fast-paced flick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I asked my mom what, in her opinion, made a good airplane movie. The only answer she provided was something loud enough for her bad ears to hear over the engine and ambient airplane noise. Okay, a bit of a non-answer, but this falls neatly into the second movie I chose on my eight-hour escapade, and what is one of the most important parts of an airplane movie: pacing. In-flight entertainment is designed to burn your time, ensuring you are not feeling every excruciating moment of the child behind you kicking your seat. \u201cOcean\u2019s Eleven\u201d was the movie I chose \u2014 my seat partner, who was apparently hip to my burgeoning airplane-movie philosophy, chose one of the Mission Impossible installments. They both ultimately achieve the same goal: a movie that takes you to so many places, logistically and geographically, that you forget where you are. It\u2019s not my favorite genre of movie, but it\u2019s a good place to turn while your movement is so entirely restricted, and you need to live vicariously through someone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This genre scratches a different itch as well. The sad truth is that I often go on my phone while watching movies on land, but not here! In the lawless world of the sky, my phone essentially becomes a brick because I refuse to figure out in-flight Wi-Fi. These action movies are able to provide a remnant of the over-stimulation I have become accustomed to on my devices. Maybe it\u2019s not as emotionally comforting as a more classic movie, but the movie knows I need 50 things happening at once and 12 jump cuts a minute to keep me awake. I\u2019ll take it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pseudo-propagandistic feel-good<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yeah, I\u2019m not super proud of this one. I think I just wanted to shut off my brain at this point, so I went somewhere I haven\u2019t been since the swim season of my senior year of high school, to a movie my coach would have us watch every year. \u201cMiracle\u201d follows the assembly of the 1980 Olympic Hockey team and a fantastic underdog story about hard work, hope and, yeah, beating the Russians. The whole American excellence thing is a bit of a hard pill to swallow right now, but I think it\u2019s a good reminder about what some light American propaganda can look like, even disguised as an underdog story.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-2    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>These movies are selected and placed in front of us. We are limited by what Delta allows, stuck with \u201cMiracle\u201d and whatever Marvel has shilled out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/long-overdue-and-a-little-too-late-black-widow-is-a-double-edged-sendoff\/\">recently<\/a>. Like \u201cThe Princess Bride,\u201d there\u2019s so much time to revisit these movies and laugh at the weird ways they\u2019re reinforcing more traditional messages and worldviews, and maybe up in the sky, they feel a bit less removed from reality. Someone knows that they\u2019re bogus, not one of those serious movies that we watch on land. Or maybe the cabin pressure is getting to me.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>The straight-to-streaming time-suck<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>No one goes into these movies knowing they\u2019re going to be terrible. Although I might have had a clue in the case of \u201cThe Luckiest Man in America.\u201d The movie follows the true story of a man who won way too much money on the game show \u201cPress Your Luck\u201d by memorizing the patterns of the board. An entire subcategory of this particular airplane movie category is these weird biopics that we keep getting because of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/bohemian-rhapsody-review\/\">\u201cBohemian Rhapsody\u201d<\/a> and the weird number of <a href=\"https:\/\/umlconnector.com\/2024\/09\/hollywood-has-run-out-of-ideas-why-are-all-new-movies-remakes-and-sequels\/\">prequels, sequels and reboots<\/a> that studios seem to have nowadays. What I don\u2019t understand about \u201cThe Luckiest Man in America,\u201d however, is that this random man does not have street cred with the average person. Who did they think was going to see this movie? I genuinely think only Walton Goggins (\u201cThe Righteous Gemstones\u201d) die-hards and myself. I don\u2019t blame Freddie Mercury or \u201cPress Your Luck\u201d for my entrapment, though. The blame lies fully with YouTubers Rhett and Link, who did an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JGNiafLl0iA\">episode<\/a> about this man. It stuck with me. I wanted to know more. And you know what? That 13-minute YouTube video was better than this movie.<\/p>\n<p>Thus the curse of the straight-to-streaming slop. Movies that only serve to fuel my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cinenerdle2.app\/battle\">cine2nerdle<\/a> addiction, but are nevertheless a rite of passage for when your cabin fever starts to set in. They exist as a sort of shared psychosis that can only be accessed in the sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I like telling people about the weird niche airplane movies I watched, in the same way some people like to talk about their dreams. What odd, cast-aside movie you choose to adopt in those choice moments above the ground perhaps speaks to who you are in a weird way. An airplane can capture the same magic that a movie theater can. You discover what you notice with your undivided attention and can find yourself in that liminal movie above the sky that maybe still feels a little unreal. <\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-3    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/film\/the-art-of-the-airplane-movie\/mailto:corolfes@umich.edu\"><em>corolfes@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This past weekend, I slid into an assigned seat on what I think was the biggest airplane I have ever been on. Stuck between a window and a stranger for a flight over the Atlantic, I decided to seize the moment to do what is probably only acceptable 40,000 feet in the sky \u2014 watch [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[2613,732,2614],"class_list":{"0":"post-2398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-airplane","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-teach"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2400,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions\/2400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}