Sometimes, when the internet inserts itself into the filmmaking process, the results are decent — like when irate fans forced a redesign of Sonic the Hedgehog. More often, though, having a vocal online minority of people dictate the direction of a movie is a mistake. One of the early instances of the World Wide Web forcing itself in the director's chair came in 2006, when Snakes on a Plane became a viral sensation. With a silly concept and wonderfully, bluntly dumb name, the internet latched on to their vision for a joke movie, and the studio even went back under the hood to try to deliver on the hype. But when Snakes on a Plane came out 20 years ago, on August 18, 2006, it underwhelmed at the box office. It was more successful as a meme than it was as a movie, and while there's a valuable lesson to be learned here that Hollywood refuses to internalize, consider letting Snakes on a Plane slither into your heart. It's not a total disaster of a movie; it's a fun disaster movie.
The disaster genre is a broad one. You can have serious, gripping disaster films with grounded premises like Contagion, or ones that are surprisingly heavy, like the Gerard Butler movie Greenland. You could also have disaster films that are pure popcorn shlock, like Armageddon or the Gerard Butler movie Geostorm. Snakes on a Plane, of course, falls into the latter category, sinking its fangs into a bunch of familiar genre tropes in a way that feels like you're being comfortably constricted.
The disaster on Snakes on a Plane is contrived by design, but the way it plays out follows the standard disaster movie beats. We meet our protagonists, crucial FBI witness Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) and Samuel L. Jackson as Neville Flynn, the agent assigned to protect him on a flight from Hawaii to the mainland. We also meet a bunch of other passengers and members of the crew. There's Julianna Margulies as flight attendant Claire Miller and Lin Shaye as the more-senior flight attendant who basically wears a sign around her neck saying "only one more flight until I retire," which, as anyone who has watched The Simpsons can tell you, is a red flag. There are secondary and tertiary characters we're predisposed to like, presumably so we can be sad when they get knocked off one-by-one by snakes. And there are the characters whose deaths we're supposed to gleefully look forward to, like the guy who tampers with the smoke lavatory alarm or a couple who try to join the Mile High Club. (First rule of any horror movie: Don't have sex!)
The disaster, the result of crime lord Eddie Kim's novel attempt to kill Sean before he can testify against him, occurs mid-flight when countless venomous snakes (plus a few constrictors to mix things up) emerge from a crate that's been loaded into the cargo hold. The tension leading up to the disaster — the thing audiences are here to see — builds up slowly, then happens all at once the way it does in many of the most fun disaster movies. Background extras perish en masse, characters we expect to die to meet their end in entertaining ways, and most (but not all) of the characters we do like manage to survive. There are some special effects, a couple of harrowing moments, and comic relief to keep the mass death from getting too intense. By the time the credits roll, the audience hasn't necessarily learned anything, but much the same way you'd want to see a twister or a volcano in movies named Twister or Volcano, Snakes on a Plane delivers where it's most important.
If all of this sounds like backhanded praise for Snakes on a Plane, well, it's not not that. Snakes on a Plane isn't a "good" movie. Even the most favorable reviews when it was released praised it as a B-movie. The ceiling was pretty low on this one, but then again, the floor wasn't too far away. Snakes on a Plane made just $15 million on its opening weekend, half of what estimates suggested it might make based on all the online hype.
This makes sense. If you bought a ticket for Snakes on a Plane believing it's going to make all your epic, irony-poisoned online dreams come true, you were bound to be disappointed. (Evidently the bigger issue was that these people didn't even bother buying tickets in the first place.)
However, if you can ignore Snakes on a Plane for its meme potential and instead just put your seat in an upright position, fold your tray table, and ready yourself for its cruising altitude on a disaster movie that delivers the goods? You'll have a nice flight.
