21 of the Best Movies for Anyone Who Ever Wanted to Fly
You have to go quite far in the history of cinema to get to a time before we made films about airplanes. In the earliest films, we flew in a fantasy context (think Georges Méliès and his A Trip to the Moon ), but shortly after the introduction of airplanes, more plausible flight scenarios began to appear in films. the flying aces of World War I provided an early inspiration. Many of the earliest films featuring aircraft were also war films, but filmmakers realized relatively quickly that there was a lot of excitement to be found in the air, even outside the realm of dueling biplanes. The 1920s and 30s were an era when human flight was just beginning to develop into a safe and convenient form of travel. Later World War II dogfights provided filmmakers with material for decades to come. And of course, there’s a lot of drama to be found on commercial airliners.
All of these films are about the thrill of flying, inspired by the release of the long-delayed Top Gun sequel. Despite the mundane nature of commercial flights, few of them suggest that air travel is safe or peaceful. (There are some great films about flying smoothly through the clouds.) What these films really deliver is a substitute thrill for all of us who tend to grip our armrests too hard during slightly bumpy landings in Newark.