7500 (4 Stars)

This is an Amazon original movie, made by the German director Patrick Vollrath in a mixture of German and English. It's probably about a third German and two thirds English, but I've labelled it as a German film anyway.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tobias Ellis, an American pilot who lives in Berlin. He lives with his Turkish girlfriend, and they have a son who's about to enter school. He's the co-pilot on an evening flight from Berlin to Paris. Almost all of the film takes place in the airplane cockpit. This gives the film a claustrophobic atmosphere comparable with "Locke".

There are three terrorists on the plane, German-speaking Turks. Shortly after the plane takes off they attempt to force their way into the cockpit, using broken bottles as weapons. One of them succeeds before the door is slammed shut. He kills the pilot and wounds Tobias, but Tobias manages to knock him out by hitting him with a fire extinguisher. The other two terrorists try in vain to break down the door, while Tobias arranges to divert the plane to Hannover.

This is a film that could never have been made in America. The action is toned down. The film's emphasis is on realism, not excitement. Does this work? In part. The first half hour runs too slowly, even after the terrorists have revealed themselves, but the rest of the film has the correct balance between the calm calculations of the co-pilot and the chaos in the plane on the other side of his door.

We have to ask ourselves whether Tobias is acting correctly. The mistakes he makes are annoying to me, as a viewer, but under extreme circumstances anyone would make mistakes. For instance, at the beginning he ignores the terrorists and concentrates on his flight to Hannover. After a while he engages in conversation with them. That's his biggest mistake. As soon as he starts talking, it gives the terrorists the courage to make demands. They threaten to kill passengers if Tobias doesn't open the door, but as we find out later, their intention is to crash the plane into a city centre, so it doesn't matter whether they kill individual passengers or not. Admittedly, without the conversations the film would have been emptier and probably more boring.

The film can be faulted on its details. The motivation of the terrorists isn't clear. They say they want revenge for their brothers being killed, but they don't specify which brothers they're talking about. There aren't many Turkish terrorists, compared with other nationalities, and German Turks are the last I would expect to become terrorists. The Turkish immigrants in Germany have become very comfortable and westernised, so radicalised German Turks are a very small minority.

The matter of Tobias having an unmarried relationship with a Turkish woman poses questions that remain unanswered. It's a detail I would have left out.

The poignancy of Tobias being a close neighbour of the youngest terrorist works well. Watch the film for yourself to see what I mean. It's only discovered towards the end of the film, but I wish it could somehow have been brought up earlier.

This isn't a film for everyone, but if you want to watch a very un-American film, I can recommend "7500". The acting by Joseph Gordon-Levitt is first rate. We don't expect anything less from him.