7500, at first glance, seems to have a nifty concept going for it. It takes place entirely aboard an airplane, a setting that should lend itself to an air of claustrophobia. There’s something truly terrifying about being stuck in a place where you can lose all control, especially when one’s life is hanging in the balance.
So why wasn’t 7500 scary, despite the whole there’s-nowhere-to-hide thing going for it? Maybe it’s because the film, helmed by Takashi Shimizu (the director of the Ju-on films), is weirdly inert; when incidents do happen, they are mostly clichéd and predictable.
The film follows a group of passengers on board Flight 7500, en route to Tokyo from San Francisco. There’s the stewardess who is sort of in love with the pilot; there’s the uppity, racist girl; there’s the couple working out their relationship issues; and then there’s the resident douchebag of the film (because horror films with a large cast always need their own douchebag), among others.
There’s no point remembering names. Even though the first ten minutes of the film tries to establish their backstories and struggles, those aren’t meaningfully tackled in any way in the film. You’ll hardly get to know the characters well. Some of them are so loathsome you know they exist just to be included in the film’s total body count.
Flight 7500 meets with some sort of trouble mid-air, and this causes one of the passengers to have trouble breathing, which in turn leads to his death. Later on, the plane meets with a terrible turbulence, and this convinces the passengers that they must be dealing with a supernatural force, and that it must have originated from the deceased passenger.
The film spends a lot of time building up to… something, but we’re not quite sure what that something is. There’s a lot that is hinted at (which is perfectly fine) but that which is hinted at never really appears, and it comes across as a failed promise for viewers (that is not okay). There are few scenes that are genuinely scary; many of the ones that frightened me were jump scares, which rely on abrupt and loud sound effects. It’s a pity, because there was an incredible setup in the film for something truly terrifying but that was unfortunately squandered.
There’s a twist that comes late in the film, but instead of illuminating what happens before it (think M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense), this one only ends up trivialising everything that happened beforehand.
Overall, a disappointing and mostly dull affair, if only because it had the ingredients to be a much more frightening film.
Summary: Not without its funny and frightening moments, but these are unfortunately few and far between.
RATING: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Raymond Tan