Collision Course
Collision Course
| 27 March 2012 (USA)
Collision Course Trailers

Kate Parks has spent the past year on tour promoting her book, an in-depth look at the attempted cover up of her husband's death in a plane crash. Now all she wants is to return home to her daughter, 15-year-old Samantha. But when a powerful solar flare strikes her flight home, killing the pilot, knocking out the co-pilot and frying all the electronic systems on the plane, it looks like she may not get there. As panic sets in among the passengers, Kate works with flight attendant Jake to manage the growing chaos and tension on the plane as she tries to keep 30,000 tons of steel hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour. Flying blind, Kate tries to find a way to communicate with air traffic control - one way or another, this plane is coming down. With the passengers' lives on the line, Kate will have to find a way to land safely... or never see her daughter again.

Reviews
Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Paul Magne Haakonsen When I sat down to watch "Collision Course", I must admit that I had initially set myself up for expecting a very poor B-movie with questionable effect and possibly equally questionable acting. However, I will say that I was more than pleasantly surprised with the outcome of "Collision Course".Granted, this is not a bright, shiny moment in the history of cinema, but it was still entertaining enough for what it was, and it was actually fairly enjoyable as well. Sure, the storyline was generic and had been seen countless times before in other movies.Kate (played by Tia Carrere) is an author out promoting her new book, when she is returning back home by airplane. However, a powerful solar flare disables the systems aboard the plane, kills the pilot and injures the co-pilot. As panic sets in, the passengers must step up and find a way to return safely to the ground.The acting in the movie was adequate, and Tia Carrere performed well in "Collision Course". It was also nice to have Dee Wallace and David Chokachi star in this movie, as they did quite alright right alongside Tia Carrere."Collision Course" had fair enough special effects and CGI, although it was scarce. But what was there served their purpose well enough.Certain things throughout the movie made little or no sense at all, such as how easy it was to hack a satellite, or why planes on collision course doesn't just turn from their current path in order to prevent a midair collision, especially when at night and the flight lights are clearly visible kilometers away. Or how quickly the flight director overcame his guilt of two planes crashing and hundreds dying and wholly forgot all about it.This is an entertaining enough movie for what it was, and it turned out to be a nice surprise actually. But chances are that you have already seen a movie with a storyline fully similar to "Collision Course". And once you have seen it, then chances are slim that you will actually sit down and watch it again.
Leofwine_draca COLLISION COURSE is another cookie cutter disaster/thriller movie from Fred Olen Ray. I noticed that Jason Bourque, the man responsible for directing such movies as ASTEROID: FINAL IMPACT and DOOMSDAY PROPHECY, helped to write the script. Unsurprisingly, this is the sort of film shown on the SyFy Channel, a safe, bland, and extremely derivative type of movie that copies pretty much every plane thriller in existence.The story is about solar flares and the havoc they're wreaking here on Earth. Some people are trapped on an out-of-control passenger plane when the pilot is killed by a flare and the co-pilot is knocked out cold. The only person with the power to save the passengers and crew is a writer who knows a thing or two about flying planes.It's amazing that a film with a potentially exciting premise like COLLISION COURSE can be so dull. Fred Olen Ray is up to his old tricks here, incorporating stock footage of expensive stuff (i.e. explosions) from other movies and generally fumbling the non-existent suspense. An ageing Tia Carrera is the best actor they can come up with and her acting is very poor.
Laakbaar This is apparently an American TV movie in that it was produced for SyFy. I don't know enough about movie-making to understand why TV movies have a such a different feel than other movies. The writing? The acting? In any case, this movie certainly felt like a TV movie. (Yes, I watched it on TV. I've been too busy to go out.)For the first hour, I was also absolutely convinced that this had to be a Canadian TV movie, my initial impression being confirmed by the earnest hoser approach of the flight attendant, the redneck's weeping, and the "racism sucks" bit. But, nope, it was apparently not a Canadian movie.The problem is the inept writing, I guess. The airplane-movie clichés are rolled out, one after the other. The dialogue had us squirming. Why do some movie makers feel that people will bare their souls when disaster strikes? Some of the dialogue was just wrong. Why would the flight attendant who was putting in extra hours to provide for his family continue to put in extra hours after his family fell apart? After a while, we became morbidly curious to see what they would bring out next. I can only assume the director had to produce a script overnight.The over-the-top acting was appropriate for the context, I suppose. You wouldn't call it real acting, but then I don't think this would have been possible in the circumstances. I suppose they were going for cult status from the beginning. Was this a deliberate attempt at schlock?Although to be fair, there were a few mildly amusing and interesting bits, here and there. Everyone likes airplane movies, but this one wasn't realistic enough. Many of us have flown enough to experience what passengers will do in serious turbulence. (For one thing, some of the girls and women will start screaming like sirens. Ladies, it doesn't help.) There have also been some shockingly realistic plane crash scenes in the movies lately. The last ten years have seen CGI explode in its sophistication. I'm afraid we're a different audience than the ones who were gobbling this kind of thing up in 1975.How is this even science fiction? It annoys me that there is so much great science fiction out there, but so little of it gets shown on SyFy. Why aren't they showing Battlestar Galactica? Or any of the Star Trek series? Many of the movies and shows that I think of as being brilliant science fiction are not being shown. How can they even call themselves a sci fi station? They're not, right?
TheLittleSongbird Collision Course may not quite be bad enough to be on a personal worst movies ever list or the very worst movie to air on the SyFy Channel(any contenders for that title make for a very large number). That is saying next to nothing though, because it still has everything bad about melodrama/disaster movies at their worst. To search for a redeeming quality you'd have to look very hard, but for anything that came across as least bad about Collision Course it was Dee Wallace who does try to give some compassion to material that was beneath her. Generally in regard to the acting Collision Course is a very poorly-acted film, with the actors ranging from overwrought emotion(Tia Carrere applies here) to no emotion or acting skills at all. The acting is not the only bad thing, everything about Collision Course is bad. The drab look of the movie is very unappealing, and further disadvantaged by about 20 years out of date special effects that show no signs texture, shading or proportion and simplistic camera work. The dialogue gives meaning to the term banal and practically insults it too and gets increasingly turgid and predictable. The story shows no tension, fear of characters' predicaments or heart, and instead consists of very questionable science/maths, pedestrian pacing and ham-fisted melodrama. The characters are also the sort that we never care for or know anything about, that they're written in such a cardboard fashion and acted lazily doesn't help. Overall, there's worse out there- you'll agree or disagree here- but Collision Course at the end of the day was very difficult to endure. 1/10 Bethany Cox