Black Box: Flight 298 Review – There’s a Monster in the Grip of Airborne Conspiracy Horror | film

forGet ready for a turbulent ride of very varying quality but arriving at its destination in style. Black Box: Flight 298 is a sci-fi horror thriller that takes place mostly on a flight supposedly from New Orleans to Seattle, though it’s quite clear that this was shot in a studio equipped with plenty of green screens to accommodate some of the cheesy visual effects in the back half.

However, before director Stephen Quill and screenwriter Stephen Sosco reveal the mastermind behind all this chaos, they build a pretty good cliffhanger by alluding to the paranoia and terror that many feel around air travel. The opening text ominously claims that the rates at which planes are losing contact with ground controls are much higher than the US Federal Aviation Administration admits, which doesn’t sound so bad to viewers not prone to aerophobia. But that’s just the beginning of threads bouncing off paranoid tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories — there’s literally a character who wraps his head in aluminum foil to protect himself from upper-atmospheric radiation — as well as general anxiety about strange things crashing into the stratosphere.

In the cast, Tom Britney comes to the fore as Jeremy, a bereaved-faced man, who begins to suspect something is seriously wrong when the sky begins to put on a light show of all colors. He ends up teaming up with sensible flight attendant Emma (Holly White), Air Marshal Lorraine (Boadicea Ricketts), and moppet Chloe (Molly Bell Wright) when the big bad reveals itself, and they hide in the baggage hold with a lot of distressed dogs. Hilarious moments are provided when an obnoxious first-class passenger (Danny Mac, like many of the other actors here, is actually a Brit with his best American accent) is assaulted and assaulted in other humiliating ways.