The perils of picking the perfect plane movie

The Spinoff

2 days ago

The most important part of any holiday is what you choose to watch on the flight there and back, writes Alex Casey.
I cannot even begin to express to you how much the guy across the aisle was fanging to watch The Crow (2024). Most of us were still finding our seats, stowing our carry-on and steeling our wills for the 17-hour flight ahead of us, but he was already somehow into double digits on the duration, utterly transfixed by last year's ' unfathomably awful ' Bill Skarsgård reboot.
Far from ridiculing this man, I envied him. He demonstrated the same self-assuredness of another passenger I had encountered accidentally sitting in my seat on a previous flight. The screen revealed he was already deep into Michael Jackson's greatest hits playlist and, after the smooth criminal soon found his allocated seat, we all celebrated with an extremely tinny 'Billie Jean' leaking through his flimsy Emirates headphones once more.
In-flight entertainment is particularly crucial for New Zealanders. If you are woke enough to know what the hell it even says on those confusing little black books, you probably also know that we require at least the duration of two feature length films to fly anywhere deemed 'overseas'. To get to Japan you will need 11 hours. To get to New York you will need 16 hours. To reach London Heathrow, you'll need at least a full 24 hour day. We're gonna need more than just quizzes to get us through.
You'd think this type of long-haul endurance flying would make us savvier than most when it comes to curating our in-flight entertainment. Alas, on a recent 17-hour flight from Auckland to Dubai, I witnessed dozens of New Zealanders completely lose their minds in a prison of indecision. One person watched an entire season of The White Lotus, but completely out of order. Another watched two minutes of Iron Man, then two minutes of Frozen 2, then immediately fell asleep to Avatar 2.
To be absolutely clear, I am also one of these people (made a 40+ hour watchlist including Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Joker 2: Folie a Deux, watched five minutes of Lilo and Stitch chased down by an episode of… Scare Tactics??). If you too find yourself riddled with indecision and neuroses, here are eight simple rules to successfully select movies for your next long haul flight.
1. Horror seldom works out
One of the craziest mistakes among the many that I made was popping on Steven Soderbergh's Presence, a slow-burning spooky thriller shot from the POV of a ghost, right as the lights went up and the trolleys of sweaty omelettes started trundling past for breakfast. Anything remotely scary requires the right atmosphere to build tension, and hurtling through the sky in a sealed fart tube is simply not it. I also watched the opening scene of The Monkey, and promptly turned it off following the first disembowelment because the children in the row behind me were crying.
2. Backfill the critical darlings
If there's a festival, foreign, or Oscar-nominated film on offer, or any film that you nearly paid cold hard cash to see at the cinema: watch it on the plane. You are earning back the price of a $20 ticket with every choice, and given that I put away The Apprentice, Kneecap, The Last Showgirl and The Outrun on just one leg, I earned back a tidy $80 entirely through sitting on my arse. That's not 'girl math' by the way, that's just math. Girl math is the fact that I watched all of The Last Showgirl even though I found it to be quite a bore, all because I still feel bad for how we all treated Pamela Anderson.
3. Beware the boxset
I saw a couple of confident folks immediately ripping into franchises like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings from the very beginning, implicitly committing to watching the full boxset for the entirety of the flight. Again, I admire and envy the conviction, but I worry about this avenue. What if you fall asleep before they've even taken the hobbits to Isengard? There's also a question of legacy: do you want to forever remember your trip to Europe where you got surprise engaged under the Eiffel Tower as 'The Harry Potter holiday'? Just something to think about.
4. Avoid novelty choices
I know a long haul flight is a liminal space, and sometimes crossing certain time zones means you are gifted extra hours on the clock, but that doesn't mean you have to watch Air Fryers: Are They Worth It? because it might make for a funny joke one day. Same goes for buzzed-about stinkers like Megalopolis and It Ends With Us, which I hovered over thinking 'well if not now, then when?' In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, which the person next to me watched half of before switching to Encanto: 'your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.'
5. Old is often gold
Guy Montgomery has a joke about watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time on a tiny screen on a long-haul flight, just as Stanley Kubrick intended. While it does feel hugely disrespectful and discordant to experience the classics of cinema on a plane, there's something thrilling about watching something a relic of the past while propelling through the skies in anticipation of the near future. There's also a hallucinogenic quality to so many old movies that they can also work as a drug-free trip when you are sleep-deprived and dehydrated. For example, I watched Whatever Happened To Baby Jane (1967) and had cool dreams of crazed Bette Davis in a nightie waiting for me at immigration.
6. Animal anything always
Whenever I got up to stroll the cabins, one thing was abundantly clear: people of all stripes really, really love that movie featuring Steve Coogan and an animated penguin. Any film that could have a pull quote describing 'a true story of wit, warmth, and cute [insert any animal] antics' is always going to over well when you are feeling vulnerable, anxious or homesick in the skies. My personal highlights from this genre were Paddington in Peru and a National Geographic documentary about the close relationship between a Scottish man and a river otter named Molly. Five stars.
7. Let the tears flow freely
Being on a long flight strips you of all distractions and reduces you to your base elements: you eat, you sleep, you excrete. It always means you are likely to feel your emotions more deeply, whether that be boiling rage at the nearby passenger picking their nose and eating it, or unbridled joy at the sight of a single slice of fresh fruit. It can also mean you are more prone to tears: and lots of them. I was in full shoulder-shaking sobs during Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy and the cabin crew didn't even blink, ditto during We Live in Time. Beware though: at 30,000 feet, even Harry and the Hendersons will make you weep (reminded me of my dog).
8. Short on time? Go sitcom
Find yourself with less than 90 mins before landing? Don't start a movie and promise to finish it when you get home, because you will either forget entirely or have to watch the whole thing from the start again. Instead, beloved sitcoms are your best friend here. With 20 minutes until landing, I cracked open season five of The Office US and watched the weight loss episode, instantly giddy with silent laughter and trails of tears down my cheeks. Sure, much of the episode would be cancelled in 2025, but you're not in 2025 in the sky. You're on plane time.