Gerald Butler is such a gifted actor. So I can't understand why he stars in movies where there are so many careless factual errors. And obvious plot twists. It's like the movie makers are telling you something, we know you are stupid, or may be these movies are made for a certain kind of audience, an audience that just wants cheap action. Feels like the plot was written in the 80's for an audience in that era. After Olympus has fallen, I started getting offended with Mr Butler's movies. I love aeroplanes, so that begining AC-130 scene in Olympus has fallen was just a middle finger to people like me, just like this movie was. Things that annoyed me.
1. Airplanes are designed to take lightning strikes. They were crashes in early history of planes, but most aeroplanes are built like Faraday cages to keep the surge away from avionics and other things.
2. Avionics don't just burn out like that they have backups and redundancies, and if they do the engines would follow, throttle control is not manually controlled by a lever like old planes. They are also electronic. So I didn't understand the countdown before landing.
3. The agent taking off his seat belt was bad and stupid especially while in the storm, just to pic up a bag, the air Steward was even more stupid. Even more stupid was the Captain leaving the cockpit to say hello to the passengers, what is the address system for?
4. Some Oxygen masks fell, while others didn't.
5. After landing, they didn't know where they were, but they all had smart phones all of which have GPS, all they needed to do was to get the GPS coordinates, even if the maps didn't load.
6. When the bad guys came, they asked for the manifest. Didn't bother to count or to check the plane for passengers or anything, they saw the plane and were like. That empty no Check big 100 seat plane.
7. They didn't destroy, shoot or sabotage the plane (that's when I knew that was what they were going to use to escape)
8. Unless they are hijacked every weekend, no airline has a government styled situation room, we don't even know who the people in the room are.
8. On a remote island, which has had no power, electricity or water for years, an old land line phone miraculously works by joining two random wires together, and can make a miraculous international phone call, and after a small fight stops working. Was that the only phone in the whole building?
9. ............I have to stop here. It's getting too long.
After movies like Denzel Washington's Flight, and Tom hanks' Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, making so many errors in a Plane disaster movie is just unacceptable especially today. This movie just feels like it was made in the 80's.
I enjoyed some of the action and tension at the end. I just feel they could have made a better movie.