State of body	Oooooooh, where to start. Um, dead? Yeah. Very dead. Strange puncture wounds. Mysterious.
Detail of inspection	Inspected once.
Forensic Investigator	shellshear
Comments	So much potential! Well, I thought so anyway. A classic example of a movie playing it far too safe; of failing to properly explore the premise.

“Look!” I said to Dr Winston. I jabbed at the monitor, leaving a big fingerprint smear on it in my excitement, and sending it teetering back and forth on its stand. “A website wherein I may submit my awesome film ideas!”

“Scam,” said Dr Winston.

“Quick and easy… pitch to Hollywood execs… and such reasonable administration fees!”

“Total scam,” said Dr Winston. “Is this why you summoned me to the lab in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm?”

“No,” I said. “I summoned you here because I accidentally loosed about a thousand snakes in the autopsy room, and they’re getting awfully bitey.”

Dr Winston sighed, walked over to a window, and opened it. The howling gale outside immediately created enormous suction. Dr Winston flattened himself against the wall and clung on to the sideboard, while I started rolling backwards on my chair. I grabbed at the monitor as it flew past. A few seconds later, I was desperately hugging it, my legs pointing horizontally at the window, the power cord gradually working loose. Snakes rained past in green and yellow streaks, swirling out the window in a seething kalaidoscope of venomous doom. The snake storm gradually abated, and Dr Winston reached across and closed the window. I tumbled to the ground; the monitor smashed next to me.

“Anything else?” said Dr Winston.

“There’s a swarm of spiders in the sauna.”

“Uh huh. And no doubt a zoo of zesty zebras in your zepplin.”

“It’s high concept!”

And it is, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a well-executed high-concept film. All “high-concept” means is that the film has an easily encapsulated premise. But “Snakes on a Plane” has a big problem: it doesn’t really appear to enjoy its stratosperically high concept, even though - possibly for the first time ever - the pitch is the name of the film. It gets snakes onto its plane with all the enthusiasm and gleeful wickedness of a convention of accountants-who-moderately-enjoy-Kenny-G, and once it gets them loose, has no idea what to do with them. When you have a high concept, it’s critical to play the varients on the theme; to discover aspects and consequences that are not obvious, but follow naturally from the premise. “Groundhog Day” has the whole idea of varients on the theme built into the high concept. But “Snakes on a Plane” never develops its themes.

The problems start early. The audience is always going to accept the excuse for putting the snakes on the plane. There’s a rule of thumb that you can get away with one big implausibility in anything - long-lost identical twin, rain of frogs, whatever - if it then becomes what that thing is about. Nonetheless, there are many, many better excuses for Snakes on Planes than “We’re trying to kill a witness for the prosecution, and we’re really desperate.” It feels like they lacked the confidence to make this a terrorist plot. Having the bad guys as drug dealers seems like a cop-out. Isn’t the idea of a huge mass of poisonous snakes on an aeroplane the very definition of terrorism? Sure, we can make it about killing an individual on the plane - but the idea of using snakes should be sadism, not desperation. The targeted individual should be terrified of snakes, or have something to do with snakes; the terror then comes with a message, and we immediately have a plot point we can work with: “You mean, the reason there are a thousand poisonous snakes on this plane is that your nickname is ‘Snake’?”

So, we have scenes of the dogs sniffing the cargo, and we are introduced to the passengers as they board. There are some potential moments we should have if we’re really going to savour our snakes. We should see someone having to throw away a pen-knife, or better still, remember at the last second to put it in their checked luggage. We should see people being searched, scanned and processed; rendered harmless against the threat we know is coming. In addition, because this film is about the fear of flying - what’s the worst thing that could happen on a plane flight? - we have to have some potential terrorists on board. Arabs, Sikhs, someone in a burkha - this is rich, wicked territory. I can’t help feeling that by avoiding talking about terrorism at all, this film is chickening out.

This is the moment at which we introduce the Mauis, those flower rings that the air hostesses put over people’s heads. This is the way the snake pheremone plot device gets spread, and it’s the one bit of the film that really does have potential, so (of course) I’d like to mess with it here. By this point, we have already been shown the bad guys messing with the Mauis, and doing other neferious things. This is something that could easily be turned into a mystery for the audience. With every mystery, you have options: does the audience have the same information as the cast, the same, or less? If the audience has more information than the cast, a film runs the risk of making the protagonists look foolish and slow (and if they have less, the risk is of the audience getting confused, of course.) In Snakes On A Plane, the protagonists do spend an awfully long time trying to work out things that the audience already knows. We only really need to make sure we show everyone getting (or not getting) the Mauis to get the same effect: audiences nowadays are highly tuned to an unexpected emphasis. In the cases where the girl with the dog refuse a Maui, we just know it’s going to be a big deal later. And we’ll get a delicious thrill of anticipation when the sexy stewardess puts a maui on the Target Victim.

And then, the take-off. Its an utter mystery to me why they cut from them boarding the plane to them in mid-flight. They don’t show the take-off! That’s one of the best bits! That’s where we really do gets scared on planes. It’s the bit where the flight becomes irrovocable, where jumping out of the plane goes from painful to thrilling, dead or both. There are lots of bits in Snakes On A Plane that could have been cut so we do have the luxury of reintroducing this scene. At the very least, we should show the pilots - they get their scenes later, so they should be introduced here - and the scared-of-flying passengers, say, the kickboxer, to contrast with the scenes of kicking arse that he’s going to do later (in our version).

So, the plane is in the air; we’ve established our characters (in this kind of movie it’s perfectly OK to have “rich girl”, “paranoid rapper”, “snobby brit”, etc - the addition of any further adjectives is a little upmarket.) It’s time to bring out the snakes.

And this is where the film becomes boring, sadly. It’s well-known that the internet hype for the film prompted some additional filming; extra shots of sex and violence to harden the rating (originally slated to be R, then filmed as PG13, then supplimented with R material). Snakes On A Plane, in other words, suffered a Ratings Fibrillation - worse, a Late Ratings Fibrillation - and the results are visible. People are unerringly bitten on their naughty bits and other sensitive areas, and die en masse.

This brings us to the topic of why people get killed in horror and disaster films. The thrill of this movie comes from the thought: what if I was in a plane filled with biting snakes? What if this happened to me? By killing people off, you emphasise the unsafeness, but each death should be a development, each death should show a failed behaviour or strategy, another way in which you wouldn’d be saved. Unfortunately, lots of people get killed in identical ways: they don’t see the snake, the snake slithers up and bites them, they die. It’s an oddly negative attitude for a film that should be fun.

And it’s such a pity: an imaginative sadist could have had a lot of fun with the deaths and near misses. Let’s substitute some scenes where the bite hits an artifical arm, is stopped by a tea tray, a scarf, a book, another snake. And then the relieved person lifts the tea tray to reveal a snake underneath. Someone throws a snake off their lap; it lands on someone elses lap. The dog lady pats a snake on the head, mistaking the movement next to her for the dog, then the dog jealously bites the snake in half.

This is about the time the audience should be noticing differences between the snakes. This is where the rules are established - we don’t want the audience getting all nihilistic, do we? So, we see that the tiny, colourful snakes kill instantly, the big snakes kill slowly and leave nasty wounds, the really big snakes kill by strangling (for a bit of variety, if not scientific accuracy). Later, when the air-conditioning goes bad, we will learn that snakes are cold-blooded, and that the warmer the plane, the more active they get.

The characters fight off the first lot of snakes and secure the area toward the front of the plane. There are a few odd details here. Samual Jackson doesn’t let anyone go up the stairs, without any particularly good reason. More strangely still, the snakes in the front area, shown to be plentiful and voracious, are never seen killed. This is the first bit of bonding for the survivors, where they take up their plastic sporks and broken glass (a great detail of the film, by the way, that there aren’t any decent weapons - not nearly played up enough, or subverted) and lay waste, working in teams. Our kickboxing expert should first show his formidable expertise here, while another character frantically struggles with a snake entangled in his clothing while someone else beats it (and him) with a serving tray. A brief moment of triumph, as people run out of snakes to dismember - then a couple of people feel woozy, and realise or recall that they’ve been bitten.

Lots of people should be bitten, but not immediately die. This is interesting. One of the things about being bitten by a snake is that you don’t usually die immediately! If you’re not an expert, you don’t even know how poisonous the snake is; whether the woozy feeling is imminent death or just a panic attack. And there are so many things that you can do: suck out the poison or cut the wound (briefly shown), tourniquet, ice to slow the poison, heat to kill it. Hell, someone could microwave their hand out of desperation, we’re going for the grotesque, after all. It’s a moment for improvisation, while Samual J. gets on the phone and gets the snake expert on the line.

The snake expert should be on the line in at most a minute. There’s far too much futzing around flying him pointlessly from place to place in the film as it stands: we should cut to him being woken out of bed, and wandering around his house holding the mobile phone, surrounded by glass tanks of snakes. Let’s establish some snake rules now, while the audience is interested.

First rule: for there to be any help at all, you need to identify the snake that bit you. Let the people who were bitten discover this, start hunting around frantically for dead snakes around them; let someone compare fangs with his bite mark, tossing snakes aside in his hunt for the right one, frantically wiping away the dripping poison.

Second rule: snakes don’t attack unless provoked. This should come as rather a surprise to the passengers, and they may well express a certain scepticism about this rule, until it is explained, to them and the audience, that something is provoking them. And right then, Samual J. works out that it’s the Mauis, and the consequences thereof; that almost all of the survivors are people who weren’t dosed.

Third rule: Snakes are cold-blooded. Let’s say that the cabin was unusually warm when the attacks happened; the bad guys fiddled with the air conditioning system. If they can just get the temperature down, the snakes will go dormant. The existing film has everyone suffocating, which is just wrong. They seem to have aeroplanes confused with spaceships, with this and the “suck all the snakes out of the plane” conclusion.

Armed with their new rules, we can then continue with a plan, which can then be messed with. The pilots can be bitten - and just to really up the tension, let’s have the pilot’s cabin completely isolated, as an extra anti-terrorism measure, so that the pilots don’t even know about the snakes until they get bitten - and they set the autopilot before they both die, so that the passengers have to figure how to get into the specially hardened cockpit to even land the plane. And the terrorists might have set up some extra traps. Snake pheremone being sprayed into the survivors area, causing a second wave of snake attacks.

Let’s cut to the chase. People will be bitten; there will be heroics from kung fu guy and Samual J. and hysterics and cowardice which shall be appropriately rewarded. Samual J. turns the air-conditioning back on, but it’s not enough, and the snakes are attacking again, so they blow the hole in the window, which lets in enough cold air for the snakes to go sluggish, and the passengers then go on a revenge rampage and kill every last motherfucking snake on the motherfucking plane, with Samual J. personally wrestling the giant anaconda to death, possibly using its constriction to somehow open the cockpit door. They manage to break into the cockpit with advice from ground control and land the plane.

When they open the landing gear, snakes fall out and into back yards all over the city.

This is the thing about the whole film. It was hastily put together, without thought or care or any sense of glee at the plight of their heroes. It’s a real pity. Snakes on the Plane had probably the most potential of all the flawed films I’ve seen to really be fun and cool. And it’s just boring and dumb.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:05 am and is filed under Action, Forensic Analysis, Horror, S, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.