Red Eye is a Hollywood Twin. That's my term for those high-concept films that Hollywood studios always churn out in pairs each year (often, even each season). Two films that have a similar premise, or 'concept', but substantially different 'development' in terms of casting, mounting, screenplay, etc. For example, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Mission to Mars and Red Planet. Volcano and Dante's Peak.
You could probably go back about, oh, fifty years and find a whole series of Hollywood Twins; it might even be interesting to list and review them all, and then compare which twin is the real one, and which is the toni! But it's only the past decade or so, I gather, that Hollywood studios have hit upon a system for these Twin thingies. It goes something like this. Invariably, once someone in Tinsel Town gets a terrific movie concept, there's a mad rush to get it into production asap. And inevitably, someone at a rival studio just happens to hear about the concept and tells his or her boss, 'that's a film we should do'.
But instead of butting heads and battling at the box office the following summer, the studios have apparently formed a loose, unwritten, protocol for dealing with such Twins. I don't know if they actually sit down and talk about these things or if they've just evolved this system to keep the competition from getting violently out-of-hand. Whatever it's origins, this 'Twins' protocal seems to include the following tenets:
1. Not more than two such films will be released in any one year;
2. While the concepts for both films may be exactly the same--a volcano erupts in a populated urban area, endangering thousands of lives, a meteor is on a collision course with Earth, Earth finally gets a manned mission to Mars--the script developed from those concepts will be substantially different;
3. The casting, promotion and 'packaging' of the film will be different enough to enable audiences to instantly distinguish between them in the media as well as at theatres.
Coming to Red Eye. It's the Hollywood Twin for this season. It's 'toni' being the Jodie Foster starrer Flightplan. And with both films releasing closely on one another's heels, it's tempting to just club both together and compare them.
Which I'm not going to do. You can do it yourself. Watch both films, back to back, if you like, and see which one developed the concept more powerfully, cast it better, directed it more effectively, the whole nine yards. I'm content with just reviewing Red Eye here and now. Because Red Eye is not just a Twin, it's also the latest entry in the long-running career of the modern maestro of horror cinema, Wes Craven, and I want to talk about him as well. And of course, Rachel McAdams, because how can I talk about any movie this season without talking about Rachel McAdams!
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