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Flightplan Plot

Flightplan is a 2005 American film directed by Robert Schwentke and starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen and Sean Bean. Its North American release was in 23 September 2005. The movie is an updated remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 film The Lady Vanishes.

Tagline: If someone took everything you live for... How far would you go to get it back?

A variation on the locked room mystery, the movie depicts what happens after Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) boards a fictional Aalto Airlines flight from Berlin to New York with her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston). About three hours into the flight, Kyle realizes that her daughter is missing. She searches the plane for her daughter and asks the flight attendants to check the passenger manifest, but, according to the list, her daughter never boarded the flight. Also, no one remembers having seen her.

A search of the airplane fails to find Julia. The captain refuses to allow the cargo hold to be searched because he is afraid that the searchers could be hurt if the freight shifts because of turbulence. Both the captain and the other crew members suspect that Kyle, unhinged by her husband's recent death, has imagined bringing her daughter aboard the airplane. She has no boarding pass stub for her daughter, and, according to the airport at which she boarded the airplane, no one by her daughter's name was on the manifest. In addition, the flight attendant who took the passenger headcount never saw anyone in the seat that Kyle's daughter was supposed to have occupied. Faced with the crew's increasing skepticism regarding her daughter's existence, Kyle becomes more and more desperate, frantic, and erratic in her behavior, continuing to insist that she brought her daughter on board the airplane with her and that she is somewhere aboard the craft. Kyle herself has second thoughts about having brought her daughter along, but becomes confident she is not imagining things after noticing a heart Julia fingered on the window by her seat.

Because Kyle helped to design the engines used on the airplane, a fictional E-474 commercial aircraft, she is able to make use of her knowledge of the airplane's layout and escapes to hunt for her daughter. She even opens her late husband's coffin, which she is transporting back to the United States. Because of her increasingly erratic, panicked behavior, the airplane's air marshal guards her. However, it turns out that the air marshal--and an on-board flight attendant and a coroner in Berlin--are the true villains. It is implied that they have abducted Julia for the same reason that they killed Kyle's husband. They plan to blow up the aircraft with explosives hidden in the non-x-rayed coffin, after they receive word that $ 50 million has been deposited in a bank account, supposedly according to Kyle's instructions. These actions are meant to implicate Kyle in their crime, and the marshal assumes the role of negotiating her demands.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants has called for an official boycott of the film, which they say depicts flight attendants as rude, uncaring, indifferent, and even one as a "terrorist." About 85,000 flight attendants are members of this association, but their boycott is expected to have a minimal impact, since the movie, as of October 21, 2005, has grossed over $77 million.