Air Crew (1980)

What makes it different from others?

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This film is excellent, surpassing my expectations in terms of the quality of the film-making and in terms of the depth of the story. Not to ruin the suspense, but the aviation difficulties of the film are more of a resolution than a starting point of the plot. The special effects could have been better, the women could have been less hysterically cruel, the ending could have had less Russian sentimental comic relief; but the movie is successful in telling a story about human beings. I would rate it even higher if the women weren't so shrewish, but that's because I like a bit of fantasy in the films I watch.

I've seen this movie, when I was only six or seven years old. I could mention, that I was very impressed by this movie. I could say, that this is outstanding work in Soviet cinematography. In '80 it was first thriller/disaster movie in Soviet Russia, where all sides of air crews' everyday life were shown. For us, Russians, this movie was more than simply "just another soviet movie", but movie, which tell to us "Look! Everyday is not calm and clear, everything is unstable". Also, this cinema is about love, family's life, every little thing in life of man as professional, as father, as husband, as good friend.This story is about group of good friends - pilots of Tu154B soviet airplane. One of them has a family - wife, daughter, others are single. As the one crew, they drive the airplane across the Soviet Union and also to the Europe. The life is calm and easy, day by day goes to the retire. But one day they were asked to go to Georgia to save people in disaster - the earthquake. During the escaping, the airplane was badly damaged to perform the successful landing, so the engineer has to go out the plane and fix the problem during the flight.So, this movie is very impressive, outstanding for '80s.

I could have look beyond the "special effects" from the 1950's if this movie had a semi-decent plot line, but it did not. Someone in the USSR movie bureau decided to get together a bunch of actors and write a soap ... when the soap idea failed they decided to take the characters, give them uniform, and a earthquake to make a movie.There are so many inaccuracies in the movie - besides the pathetic disaster sequences, I had a hard time figuring out the time line for the movie and was shocked to see the poor camera work ... I mean, can't they invest in a camera which did not reflect light (last scene.)Just overall a poor movie. Usually movies with bad effects you can laugh off ... but you couldn't here because the movie just dragged on and on and on ...

Well, a lot of people in Europe and USA think that 99% percent of Russian films is dull boring stuff. Actually, it's right for many of them. However, 'The Crew' seems to be an exception. It tells us the story of three aircraft pilots; everyone of them with his own problems: a pregnant daughter (Timchenko), a lost child (Nenarokov), problems with woman (Skvortsov). But all of this is forgotten, when they need to make an awful race : from the burning city in the Middle East to Moscow. The burning airplane in the end of the film, and other technical tricks are really amazing. The common spirit of the film is not like that of western films-catastrophies, but it's more epic. Worth seeing, if you are interested in quiet films.