I watched a few films on the plane:
Goodfellas which was as amazing as I remember,
Alita: Battle Angel which was silly but pretty enjoyable, and
T-34 which was a dumb tank movie.
I also watched
Aniara which is a swedish scifi film about a spaceship that gets knocked off course and the passengers are forced to spend an eternity flying into space. An excellent premise, but it's one of the worst films I've ever seen, and yet more proof that Scandinavians don't deserve the privilege of free speech.
The cinematography is the absolute worst blurry, shakycam, extreme close up, poorly edited 2010s crap I have ever seen. About 90% of the shots are just the face of a character or even closer, with blurry foreground objects blocking much of the frame. Dozens of times during the film I had no idea what was happening and had to guess through context, or via dialogue. A scene where a side character gets tazed features shots of the back of characters' heads, blurry shots of a guy falling down, near-isometric shots of people running, and then a shot of someones feet. The editing overall is horrendous, with some important establishing shots lasting half a second followed by long, pointless closeups of a character's eyes. I am not exaggerating when I say the 1:30 trailer contains most of the wide shots in the film.
Look at these two scenes, which are about average representations of the rest of the film:
The plot is even worse. With these high concept scifi films you often get a to point where you realise you're watching a bad movie and the whole thing starts to fall apart as they run out of ideas. In
Aniara this happens after about 20 minutes. The tone is broken every few scenes as they focus on this ultimately pointless, kitschy lesbian romance between the protagonist and the pilot. Scenes of them playing with their baby and laughing are sandwiched between mass suicide and a lesbian sex cult.
Overall the premise has a tonne of potential and they explore none of it. There are thousands of people on this ship but they seem to fluctuate between total social collapse and complete normalcy depending on the scene. There is a plot about a VR machine which allows people to escape into a natural wonderland, and then the machine commits suicide (!!!) and it's implied that everyone is addicted to it at this point, but nothing really happens. Years afterwards, the pilots are still drinking wine in the cafe.
It is honestly the worst film I have ever sat through, and is the main reason I am reluctant to watch many modern TV shows or indie films. Whenever I see stuff shot this way it makes me want to kill myself. It's like trying to watch a film on someone's phone who is 5 feet away from you in a crowd. Most of the frame is wasted space and the cameraman has epilepsy.
I am really hesitant to call any piece of art pretentious because I think that's an anti-intellectual and unwarranted label most of the time, but this
Aniara really is pretentious garbage. Don't watch it even as a joke, it's boring, ugly and disappointing.