7500 Parent Guide

On a routine flight from Berlin to Paris, First Officer Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has nothing more complex on his mind than the school he and his girlfriend, flight attendant Gokce (Aylin Tezel), want their son to attend. But when the flight attendant brings in their food for the flight, several passengers, armed with broken glass, storm the cockpit and try to take the plane. Although Tobias and the captain (Carlo Kitzlinger) repel the invaders, the captain is severely injured and Tobias sustains a deep cut on his arm. With the captain dazed and losing blood fast, Tobias is now solely responsible for the wellbeing of 85 passengers. But the hijackers are on the other side of the door…for now.

I feel like we’ve seen enough movies with Islamic terrorists. The market is saturated. It’s a trope, at this point, and it feels so cookie-cutter in almost every movie it crops up in that it tends to make me zone out. I know how the rest of the movie goes from there: the crazed zealotry, the ideological hatred of the West, and the random violence. But it just doesn’t feel as immediate as it did in 2001. We hit the same problem in the ‘80s when action movies reached what I call “Peak Russian”, and the Russian antagonist lost a lot of interest. They’re just interchangeable stand-ins for cultural bogeymen.

7500 has two advantages in this regard: Firstly, director Patrick Vollrath managed to differentiate the Islamic villains from one another. Vedat (Omid Memar) is young and unsure of both himself and the plan, where Kalkan (Passar Hariky) is much more resolute. Vedat even gets a character arc, which is almost unheard of in these kinds of movies. The other advantage is that this is a thriller, not just some souped-up star-spangled action flick where Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford storms through the plane with a sub-machine gun. As such, the characters have more opportunity to interact on a personal level – something more complex than staring down a rifle at one another.

The movie isn’t perfect, and the pacing can be a little inconsistent. But strong performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Omid Memar keep the story moving, and the comparably limited content concerns also aid the watchability. Sure, there’s a fair bit of profanity – but in my opinion, if you get stabbed with a broken whiskey bottle and realize that someone is hijacking the plane you’re on, you’re justified in a bit of cussing. The other concern is violence, and in this case it’s much cleaner than some films. A number of the killings happen off-screen, and in none of them does the camera linger, the way it does in something like The Last Days of American Crime. This isn’t gore-porn: the violence serves the plot, and the film doesn’t show much more than you need to see to get the idea. But for all the tension, violence, and personal horror, there is an interesting and surprisingly human story to be had here. I still wouldn’t recommend this as an in-flight movie…