Living in the Age of Airplanes (2015) on Netflix
NR201547mDocumentary
Airplanes turned a world where walking was the only transport into one linked by flight. Cameras cross seven continents, from jet assembly plants to seaplanes serving island nations.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.3/10560 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes57%
Trailer
Plot summary
The documentary divides its subject into five chapters and looks at how aviation changed the way people and goods move. It begins with the long era when walking was the only means of travel, followed by the wheel and mechanical transport still bound to land and sea. Later chapters count the roughly 100,000 take-offs and landings that happen each day and the more than 250,000 people in the air at any moment. It visits the Maldives, where seaplanes reach small islands and shallow waters that ships and airports cannot serve, and Antarctica, which aircraft make accessible to researchers and tourists. Cargo aviation carries perishable goods worldwide, including roses flown from Kenya to a house in Alaska.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Living in the Age of Airplanes (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The crew shot 260 hours of footage, but only 47 minutes of it appear in the finished film: IMAX theaters have hourly showtimes, so most of what they filmed could never be used.
- Principal photography took the crew to 95 locations in 18 countries on all seven continents, making Living in the Age of Airplanes the first IMAX film shot on such a scale.
- The two-hour shot of a hermit crab crawling across Maldivian sand required the crew to steer the crab in the right direction; before that, several other crabs were "auditioned" for the part.
- San Francisco fog filled up the Golden Gate Bridge just as the crew arrived to shoot it from a location they had reserved for a single day, one of the times poor weather prohibited filming.
- For the film's aerial shots the crew used helicopters, except in the Maldives, where helicopters are outlawed, so a seaplane was flown instead.
- The crew followed a shipment of roses from Kenya to an Alaskan house, via an Amsterdam warehouse and Memphis International Airport; when they reached the house and began setting up their equipment, the roses arrived.
- Harrison Ford, himself a pilot, recognized director Brian J. Terwilliger from his earlier film One Six Right and accepted the narration, which he recorded over three days in early 2014 after watching the entire rough cut five times to get into character.
