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Director: David R. Ellis
Screenplay: John Heffernan and Sebastian
Gutierrez
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson as Neville Flynn; Julianna
Margulies as Claire Miller; Nathan Phillips as Sean Jones; Rachel Blanchard as Mercedes; Flex Alexander as Three
G's; Kenan Thompson as Troy; Keith Dallas as Big Leroy; Lin Shaye as Grace; Bruce
James as Ken; Sunny Mabrey as Tiffany
Synopsis: Neville Flynn (Samuel
L. Jackson), an agent of the FBI, has to take a witness Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) on a commercial
airplane to testify against a Hawaiian based mob boss. The crime lord however
sets a trap to kill said witness and everyone on the flight to dispose of Sean
Jones - countless snakes, pent up with a special hormone, almost all of them venomous
and pissed off.
Being of the right age growing up
in the Snakes on a Plane hype, it's
bizarre someone at New Line Pictures thought
this would've been a box office smash. Maybe if it had been a PG-13, but as has
been commented on by other articles, including nudity and violence (alongside
swearing) for an R to appease the internet hype was seen as an own goal in
terms of reducing a potential audience. It was also an odd production to hype
knowing Syfy original movies, growing
into the late 2000s to 2010s, marked the point that the monster film had
tragically dissipated over the decades as a mainstream Hollywood plot type. Whilst
monster and killer animal films have been made over the years (like Anaconda (1997)), it's turned permanently
into a b-movie genre and knocked down usually into straight-to-TV and DVD work;
the ordinary American public to this day still appreciate disaster films, superheroes
and an occasional monster film if its King Kong or Godzilla, but not an
audience necessarily for a title which became arguably the first cinematic
internet meme. The internet, whilst this is a fascinating case of the web
influencing Hollywood that'd appear in the future, tends to be loader than its
actual size, an echo chamber at times which doesn't shown an accurate gauge for
a target audience, so it doesn't necessarily dictate it'll be an actual succeed
to Joe-Public.
Snakes on a Plane goes as far back as 1992, when David Dalessandro, the associate vice
chancellor of university development at the University of Pittsburgh, read an
article that year about Indonesian brown tree snakes climbing onto planes
during World War I, producing a screenplay called Venom as a result. Eventually this script would be green lit for an
actual film, all the way into the 2000s, and the internet became obsessed with
the title "Snakes on a Plane"
and how ridiculous the premise sounded. Samuel
L. Jackson came aboard just for said title, lamenting the consideration of
changing it to Pacific Air 121 and
the internet relished the idea in fan art and memes before the film even came
out, arguably the first example of internet hype that now exists for modern
blockbusters.
The fan parodies eventually
became so part of the hype that, for another major detail, they helped
influence what the final film would be through reshoots. As mentioned, what was
originally PG-13 had new scenes with harsher, ghoulish content appropriate from
a director who made Final Destination sequels.
And one parody, a fake audio trailer by Chris
Rohan, rifted on Jackson's
notoriety for swearing like a sailor in films, leading to the phrase "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking
plane!" which was crow barred into the final script.
Snakes as a Plane as an actual film conveys my weird love-hate
relationship with b-movies. As much as their virtues remind me of my love of them,
most are always never giving what is promised in the advertising or offer
something generic like a few action scenes when I prefer mine to be inventive
or weird. Snakes on a Plane still had
to be a mainstream production so it's straight laced and very predictable in
spite of how that premise promises so much, placing all its eggs on showing the
fucking snakes on a fucking plane but as a result playing everything else like
the kind of film the Zucker brothers
parodied in Airplane! (1980), even
down to someone having to take control of the plane, not because of the pilots
having fish for dinner this time but because of the damned snakes. Archetypes and
stereotypes are cast as a result - tough cop (Jackson), the witness (Phillips),
a tough female air hostess (Julianna
Margulies), and a variety of stock figures from the finely manicured, blonde
socialite with a pet Chihuahua in her bag to the snooty, mean business man not
happy first class is not available.
Snakes on a Plane is fun film, which I am not going to deny, when
you just take it as a spectacle, not surprisingly playing out as a lurid funfair
ride. But as always been a problem for me, once I think about a film like this,
and compare it to other far more unique b-movies, it's a predictable one too as
a result which could've been rewritten as an airplane disaster film. It reveals
the problem with b-movies in that I, like many, love their existence but many
of them are actually middle of the road to compensate for their wild premises. They
feel like either they could've go further or had to pull back to make a film
still commercial, many offering premises just in the advertising which (still
to this day) are far less interesting than the wild ideas a viewer can day
dream about.
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Why foreign language or straight-to-video "rip-offs", from the Italian genre films to Turksploitation, for their lower budgets developed fan followings is because they could get away with wilder ideas or be legitimately unpredictable in what the hell could take place in the next ten minutes, something sadly you can't say about Snakes on a Plane. The closest things in terms of interest is the inclusion of an egotistic rapper on the flight, Flex Alexander as Three G's, who turns out to be an immense germaphobe with stress issues, or that David Koechner from the Anchorman films is here as a chauvinistic but still lovable co-pilot.
There is also the issue, whilst I
did appreciate some of the sick humour in gags about the snakes attacking from
idiosyncratic places, and that even as CGI they don't look dreadful even in the
current day, that I find disaster films actually problematic in how they kill
off random bystanders on mass for spectacle. I've always found it worse even
than slashers which, for their obsession with just murder scenes, at least
focus on characters and give them some personalities and time to exist even as
one-dimensional stereotypes. Something about mass death of faceless individuals
feels morally grotesque for me, and its worst that this film has jarring tonal
shifts between the spectacle and, in lieu of being a disaster film at heart,
having serious dramatic scenes where you are meant to care for these bland
figures' lives.
Snakes on a Plane also feels surprisingly cobbled together - for a
film that got so much immediate attention, even getting a band formed together
for it (Cobra Starship) to make a
theme and a music video for the ending, it feels choppily put together. Even beyond
that additional, harsher content was added later, characters like the witness
(a bland baby faced figure in Nathan
Phillips in the first place) wandering off screen for major lengths of time
and a sense of being hastily constructed despite being a very simple premise. The
main villain, shockingly, never reappears after the prologue despite being the one
who thinks causing a plane, full of innocent people, to crash out of the sky
with snakes was a good way to eliminate a witness to one of his crimes,
probably one of the bigger and glaring examples of these structural holes.
The fact this was meant to be more
family friendly is felt too. Its bright colours, starting from its initial Hawaiian
locations, and tone are a time stamp of the mid to late 2000s (alongside Cobra Starship never being a thing
beyond 2006 Kerrang magazines for
me), but alongside a cast including two children, it's a film that's still
clearly meant for a wider audience that what it was in tone. It can add some
bared breasts, have a snake bite them, compensate for having a man's cock being
bitten, and have Samuel L. Jackson
swear, it's still a mainstream Hollywood production which was aiming for higher
risk stakes than a usual b-movie could. Something belies what was a New Line Cinema product that got greater
intrigue in pop culture that it should've, not only doomed by being mispresumed
for greater reward, but also with the issue that most films like this at this
scale get neutered anyway. Even if it was still an Asylum mockbuster, I've
heard at least Snakes on a Train (2006)
involved a misappropriation of Voodoo and a giant CGI snake eating a train, the
kind of material (whilst likely poorly executed) that a viewer would secretly
want, with all the risk and strangeness but usually never getting a budget
without removing these odd tangents. The irony is that, briefly with details
like adding gore and that expletive filled line for Jackson, the fans did get a chance to influence what film they
wanted; they still got, however, a narrative as usual though that these details
were bolted onto.
After it premiered in 2006,
Snakes on a Plane gained $62 million worldwide from its $33 million budget, not bad but with its
initial opening weekend seen as disappointing to the point David Tuckerman, New Line's
president of distribution, found its expectations to be a disappointment. It was
The Golden Compass (2007), a misfire
in terms of trying to make a commercial property out of Philip Pullman's acclaimed (but also controversial) children's
fantasy literature, that was arguably the production that killed New Line Cinema, but they had a string
of failures running up to it that, with Snakes on a Plane's not being the ultra
hit they wanted, probably didn't help financially. Over ten years later, and
barring some articles celebrating the film, I wonder if anyone remembers Snakes on a Plane enough to have a huge
cult; I'm still surprised I once read of this film in film magazines like Total Film anticipating some cult
phenomenon to take place in the news sections, the mediocre reactions leading
to an immediate (and deathly) silence soon after like many films that magazine
or Empire even plaster on their front covers. It's still a fascinating legacy
that arguably has a greater legacy, as the internet, whilst an echo chamber at
times, is behind a lot of films and how they are shaped or seen in the culture.
Probably the saddest things are
a) this had a chance to take a premise that, usually on even lower budgets, has
died out beyond very cheap schlock in terms of monster films and squandered the
chance to be completely over-the-top, and b) connects to the strange tale that
despite creating the Nightmare on Elm
Street franchise, and just succeeding so much with the Lord of the Rings trilogy a few years earlier, New Line Cinema still dissipated and was eventually swallowed up by
another company. That Snakes on a Plane
still made quite a bit of money back but was still being seen as a bad
investment just feels like a kick whilst they were falling over.
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