A great basic thriller about a woman, played by Jodie Foster, who accompanies her daughter and the casket of her dead husband home from Germany on a huge airplane. Jodie falls asleep and wakes up to discover her daughter is not only nowhere to be found, but no one remembers her being there. Is this all a delusion of Jodie’s or is there a conspiracy to sabotage the plane? Well, one very annoying element was the obvious red herring that they put in the film. A group of Arabs are made to look suspicious and then are accused by a Joe Average looking American to be terrorists plotting this whole thing, because Jodie remembered seeing them in a hotel looking at her earlier. Well, the trick here is to play off our prejudices and show that our biases blind us and that the real terrorist is yet again only after money. This is a cliché Hollywood gimmick that I remember even from the days of Die Hard. Hollywooders do not believe in true believers. They still actually believe (even after 9/11) that everything, even religion and ideology, is motivated by money. Now, the real sad fact is that all Arabs are not terrorists, but most all terrorists are Arabs. So what other movie or tv show other than 24 has portrayed this reality? None. Instead they make movies and tv shows that show how bigoted people react against Arabs unfairly accusing innocent people. While this is definitely a concern, it is clearly the LEAST concern in light of the actual thousands of innocent people being killed by ARAB TERRORISTS. Why do they suppress the truth? True to form, Hollyweird is more concerned about hurting criminals’ feelings than the innocent victims they murder. I reckon the real reason why they have no problems making evil criminals out of fundamentalist Christians while totally avoiding the reality of evil criminal Islamofascists is because they know that Christians won’t put fatwas on them and blow them up. Hmmmmm.
