Captain Frank Townes (Dennis Quaid) was hired to pick up an oil crew from a site that was shutting down in the Gobi Desert. The disgruntled engineers, led by Kelly (Miranda Otto), their corporate shill (Hugh Laurie), and a random hitchhiker (Giovanni Ribisi) load up, but the plane is over its weight and Frank unwisely attempts to fly through a sandstorm. Stranded miles off course with very little food or water, the survivors must decide whether to sit in place and hope to be rescued or follow the random hitchhiker, who claims to be an aeronautical engineer, and cobble together a smaller plane out of their wrecked big one.
You know how I know Mad Max: Fury Road is a phenomenal movie? It was so iconic that I recognized the desert in Flight of the Phoenix as Namibia. Probably because the actual Gobi has a lot of scrubland and vegetation which doesn't film so well when you're going for an "abandoned" aesthetic, or maybe for budget reasons. Doesn't matter. They didn't shoot on location and that's one of the very few times I've been extremely aware of that.
This isn't a terrible movie. It's not great, but not terrible. There's a lot of yelling, a lot of fake philosophizing, some truly random deaths, and a lot of shirtless dudes. I will give this bonus points for having a woman in a speaking role, not sexually objectifying her, and having people of color, none of the which the original can boast. I think they leaned too hard on making Ribisi's character "weird" so you would question his motives, instead of allowing the story beats to happen organically. Like they really wanted a human villain instead of Nature as villain. It just felt overplayed to me.
The 2004 version is currently streaming through Starz and the 1965 original is playing on Paramount+ so there's multiple chances for you to see sweaty men yelling in a desert.
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