i think painting it as a noble revenge story is just dodgy in the extreme, as the air traffic controller guy seemed to be someone who just made a horrible mistake and never really recovered from it, while the grieving father was, however you might understand his grief, a flat-out murderer. also i think the degree of blame attached to the air traffic controller is in dispute to this day, and that there were other factors that were equally to blame, but he kind of got scapegoated.
It’s hard to tell from that trailer. What I would say (having not read any of the film’s wiki page etc) is that marketing can sometimes be deliberately misleading because of what draws and audience in.
The most obvious case I can think of is Three Kings, which I felt was marketed very much as a gung-ho US army action film and I avoided it until I saw reviews pointing out it was pretty different. I mean it’s really a film about how US soldiers learning the value of the lives of Iraqis, etc.
Certainly you’re right that it seems utterly horrendous to imply the murder of Neilsen was a worthy act (reading on Wiki the guy seems to have been hailed hero back in Russia and that’s beyond fucked up). It’s a bit of an oddity as a concept really.
A far as I can tell, it is only going to be shown in one cinema as a half past one matinee. This is the same Burnley Reel that delivered the £7 box office for Shia Lebeouf last week.
So, so, so, so bad. There’s a legitimate story here about how we deal with grief/ blame, but this film does not do this in the slightest. It wasn’t Arnie’s greatest turn either, he made it feel like the Grief Terminator, dead set on getting ‘retribution’. He kept going round showing people photos of his wife and children going ‘look at them’, ‘look at them’, which was unfortunately quite comedic with his accent. Also, the ending where the grown up son of the air traffic guy tries to kill Arnie was a really weak attempt at trying to include some nuance in the film.
Plus, it wasn’t even the air traffic guy’s fault. There was poor equipment and understaffing too.
The actual depiction of the accident didn’t show him being incompetent, just him being overwhelmed by the shitty equipment and getting a bit mixed-up with the pilot, but it’s never actually mentioned again. In fact, nothing was really mentioned again. No-one seemed to actually talk about anything, whether that be losing their family, or not really being at fault for the accident. I think it was going for a ‘valiant’ killing angle. Just a waste of time really. And not in a good way.
