Not to be confused with Takashi Shimizu’s Flight 7500–which was set for a 2012 release, but didn’t arrive until 2016 and skipped theaters–Oscar-nominated director Patrick Vollrath’s feature debut 7500 has taken some time to arrive following its premiere at Locarno Film Festival last year, but it will finally be doing so this month. Led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his first live-action feature role since 2016’s Snowden, the thriller follows the star a pilot whose plane has been hijacked by terrorists, with most of the film taking place in the cockpit.
Leonardo Goi said in our review, “Patrick Vollrath’s 7500 is a one-room, one-man show. It asks you to spend 92 minutes inside the cockpit of an Airbus A319, and in intimate quarters with a young first officer who must land it back to safety once the aircraft is hijacked by a group of Islamist terrorists. It is, for the best part of its brisk running time, a stomach-churning ride that bursts with the same force and anxieties of another recent–but far superior–single-setting drama: Steven Knight’s Locke. Much like Knight’s sophomore directorial work, it seesaws between claustrophobic and expansive, a testament to how much can be achieved in a location spanning a handful of square meters. Take it as a real-time thriller, an intelligently crafted study in cinematic minimalism, and 7500 works. The trouble starts when Vollrath’s feature debut (a follow-up to his 2015 Oscar-nominated short Everything Will Be Okay) attempts the landing. High above the clouds is where 7500 feels most visceral; but when the hijacking narrows down to a face-off between pilot and terrorist, things hit a cliché-riddled, insipid terrain.”
See the trailer below.
7500 arrives on Amazon Prime on June 19.