Chariot ~ Eerily Relevant?

At the weekend we decided to catch up on the Bourne Series, a set of movies both of us had missed. After having watched the latest of the series on HBO: The Bourne Legacy our curiosity was aroused. That's not what this post is to be about though.

On our way out of the video rental store, three Bourne DVDs in hand, I noticed the cover of a DVD bearing illustration of a passenger plane in flight, with some kind of mayhem going on around it. As my mind has been on disappearance of flight MH370 and plane disasters in general a lot lately, I grabbed it just before arriving at the check-out, without reading the cover, which anyway isn't included with the rental video. The movie's title, Chariot, didn't give much away.

We watched the movie on Sunday evening, and regular commenter mike's term "quinky-dink" kept rattling around in my head throughout!

The movie, I now discover, is available online, for free. (LINK)

A little information, which I'll try to keep spoiler-free in case anyone reading this decides to watch the 90 minute film.

Chariot, released in 2013, is an independent film produced on a shoestring budget of around $42,000 by a Dallas, Texas based film company. Writer/producer was Eric Vale, director/producer, Brad Osborne and actor/producer, Anthony Montgomery. It was shot on a single set inside a non-functioning Boeing 727, with a cast of Texas-based, largely unknown but competent actors.

From information at prweb.com

In the film, seven strangers wake aboard a passenger jet in mid-flight and find themselves unwitting participants in a government evacuation program. As a seemingly devastating attack unfolds on the U.S. homeland, the passengers learn they have been chosen to be saved because of their unique skills and/or political connections. But from the beginning, the plan appears to be ill-conceived and for those aboard things quickly go from bad to worse.

"The film is-among other things-a commentary on the power and reach of the government" Osborne (producer) said. "But I never could have predicted the subject would be so top-of-mind in the public consciousness at the very moment of Chariot's release."

Osborne was referring, I guess, to the then recent NSA revelations of blanket surveillance. A year later, in 2014, the movie seems to have even more sadly weird relevance. From what's written here, perhaps such a weird relevance isn't obvious, but watching the movie, hearing dialogue of the passengers, at times made my skin crawl, bearing in mind the disappearance of MH370.

............ Unfolding in real time, Chariot boasts a number of surprising revelations and plot twists designed to keep audiences guessing to the end.

The end...or what passes for the end was a weak spot, for me.

"I just set out to write a thriller. But what was initially a fairly far-fetched plot now seems eerily believable," Vale said about his first screenplay brought to feature film status.

Again, in 2014, the film has gathered another layer of eeriness!

.....The real-life mystery of the disappearance of a passenger aircraft sparked the story idea behind Chariot. In 2003, an American Airlines Boeing 727 - registration number N844AA - vanished from an airport in Angola. Despite a worldwide yearlong search by the FBI and CIA, the plane was never seen again.