Gone with the Wind

Flight IB0114, somewhere off the west coast of Morocco. 14.01.

For a twelve hour flight, my return journey from Santiago was a lot better than my flight out nearly six weeks ago. My attempt to walk back to Las Condes (ultimately foiled at the unassailable Cruce del Autopista Costanera Norte) had one important side-effect, besides giving me one last Chilean wildlife adventure: it left me absolutely shattered by the time I got into my Uber for the airport. I nearly fell asleep several times in the cab, so when I finally boarded the plane at around half past ten, it wasn’t hard to get some shut-eye, despite having an assigned aisle seat one row from the back of the plane.

Well – I suppose that’s not strictly true. I fought hard to stay awake for the first hour for the sake of supper, but that turned out to be a wasted vigil. Shortly after crossing the Andes, we hit the most terrifying turbulence I have ever experienced on a flight somewhere over Argentina. For all of forty minutes, the plane bucked and rocked like a horse in a rodeo, sending terrifying shockwaves down the aisle and dismantling the dinner service in quite a startling fashion before it had even got going.

I suppose they cancelled supper because by the time we’d got clear of the winds, most of the meals had gone cold. Either way, beyond the very Hispanic juice club forming at the back of the plane, there was no catering for almost the eternity of the flight.

Fortunately, I wasn’t conscious for almost the entirety of the flight, either. I must have slept for at least seven hours, which has got to be a personal record. It helps that I managed to freeze my telescreen by accident only two hours into the flight, preventing me from watching any more movies. The map service on these Iberia flights looks extremely high hi-tech… too much for my poor telescreen. The best I got out of it was an old favourite: Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.

If you think that’s a childish thing to watch, the businessman on my right spent the latter half of the flight playing Angry Birds.

Before that, he watched all three of the Star Wars sequel films back to back, which I caught snatches of as I drifted in and out of sleep. I only saw the first of them in the cinema when it was released and promptly gave up on them after seeing the hackneyed cash grab that was The Force Awakens. By the looks of things, I didn’t miss out on the last two. What I saw of The Rise of Skywalker was genuinely the most contrived and confusing plot I think I have ever seen. The original Star Wars films didn’t exactly have the most intriguing dialogue, but it did have heart, a clear plot and – most importantly – originality.

Whatever happened to the movie industry? When did profit, special effects and live-action remakes become more important than a good story? I hope we can break free of this creative wasteland we’ve been in for the last decade and more.