It is time to explore another modern classic, 2014's Air, with the tag line "What If There Was None?" Air is a heartfelt apocalyptic thriller that is unlike any other modern film.
Some of your universe's critics do not understand Air. For example, reviewer jcbigbie writes, "Bad acting, bad voiceovers, bad storyline, robotic actors." Reviewer Daman-Malone writes, "Between the acting, audio style recording, story and lack of momentum, collectively with these factors, the movie was terrible." And reviewer teebear817 writes, "The absolute worst, i mean the WORST acting in movie history."
Of course, these reviewers are all incorrect. Read on for an appreciation of Air...
A small sailboat cuts through the water near the picturesque shoreline of a Nebraska lake. On the sailboat are Marcus and Kasey, a young couple expecting their first baby. After Marcus asks Kasey to put sunscreen on his back even though he is putting on his wetsuit, he gives her the gift of a stuffed bear wearing scuba gear and they take a selfie together. He then tells his wife he has been getting headaches but wants to dive nevertheless. They assemble their scuba equipment and Marcus jumps into the water.
“Hey,” complains Kasey. “What happened to ladies first?”
He quips, “That applies to doors. Not water.”
The two descend into a waterscape made up, curiously, of some kind of blue fabric and swim together for a few minutes.
Tragically, however, Marcus dies underwater, presumably due to his headache. Kasey pulls his body out of the water and onto the sailboat, but he cannot be resuscitated. Then the credits begin, accompanied by an upbeat guitar duet. Notably, the title sequence ends with the most important three credits: Written by Steve Fauquier, then Hair & Make-Up by Sasha Staley, then Directed by Nick Royer.
After the titles, the film picks up one year after the birth of Marcus, Jr. Kasey looks at the selfie she and her late husband took on their last diving trip, and then she walks to the dive shop for a tank of air so she can dive. As she enters the dive shop, a radio plays news in the background: “In the headlines this morning — get this — Australia has disappeared. Not off the map, of course, but what seems to be some sort of communications blackout is affecting the entire Pacific region.”
The dive shop owner, Kasey’s friend Henry, says, “Beautiful day for a dive.”
“You read my mind,” Kasey replies.
“Not really,” he says. “I just judge a book by its cover…when I know the author.” Then he warns her that it is against the rules for her to dive alone, but he will ignore the violation. “I think you were a fish in another lifetime,” he tells her.
She looks wistful. “A fish out of water, maybe.”
She walks with Henry to a sailboat and she explains that she sees a lot of Marcus in Marcus, Jr. Then she gets on the boat and sails along the coastline before suiting up and starting her sunset dive. Again, she swims for a few minutes past a curious blue fabric. When she surfaces, however, and pulls off her regulator, she finds she cannot breathe without her oxygen tank.
She climbs onto the sailboat and finds a dead bird. Clearly, all the air (or perhaps oxygen) in the world has simply vanished, a nightmarishly plausible scenario! The premise of the film grows shockingly clear: Kasey must figure out what is going on with only the oxygen available in her scuba tank. (We soon find out, however, that, contrary to what she told Henry, she has two more tanks in the back of her car.)
Of course, Kasey calls her parents’ house, where she has left Marcus, Jr., but they do not answer their phone. She drives her Mini Cooper (an electric car, which works when combustion engines won’t due to the lack of air and/or oxygen) away from the marina, past a fallen hot air balloon, and she nearly hits a parked car, even though she is the only person driving on the road.
She stops at a train crossing to wait for a long train, and she sees on the other side of the passing train a young man holding a hospital-style respirator to his mouth. However, when the train has passed, in true cinematic fashion, the man with the respirator is no longer across the tracks. But, shockingly, he is now on her side of the tracks. He punches her car for unknown reasons, getting her attention, and she turns to him. He tells her, “Scuba tank! Good idea! I wish I’d thought of it.” (It must be noted that when people speak without air, they can only speak a few sentences at a time.)
“I thought I was the only one left,” Kasey says.
“People aren’t that easy to kill,” he says, profoundly. “I like the wetsuit, by the way,” he says, less profoundly.
He doesn’t tell her his name, and he insists on taking her extra scuba tank. She refuses. He asks, “Do you think people in Denver or New Mexico can hold their breath longer than we can?” (Perhaps he is referring to people experienced at breathing at higher elevations, though he does not make this explicit.)
“I don’t know, kid.”
“Kid? Being older doesn’t make you superior by default.”
He draws a handgun that he says he found in a car. “Cool, huh?”
Shockingly, he fires the gun. The bullet grazes her, leaving a red mark on her temple.
Instead of running or hiding, she continues talking to him. “You psychopath! What are you doing?”
“You must have thought you were in control for a moment there, huh? Sorry, had to bring you down to earth a little.”
“Okay, okay. Just relax!” She gives him her car keys.
Before he drives off, he continues conversing with her. “There are two kinds of people in this world, the dead and the survivors. I’m a survivor. Always have been. If you want to live longer than your scuba tank allows, I suggest you become one too.” He adds, “Soldiers always know the truth. Everybody else just watches the news.” Then he drives away.
Kasey begins walking along the road. She finds a Jeep with a dead driver in the tall grass, and she also finds next to it a small yellow balloon with a USB drive attached to it with a string.
She flashes back to a conversation with her dead husband Marcus as they watched fish in a fishtank. When he comments that they don’t know they’re in a tank, she replies wisely, “We’re confined to a planet, but we don’t really think about it, do we? A prison’s not a prison if you can’t see the walls.”
Later, Kasey finds the man who stole her car dead on the road. “You took my tank but not my regulator, stupid!” She gets back in her car and drives to a nearby hospital, a small brick building with an ambulance and a dead EMT out front. She finds a woman alive in a hospital bed who is breathing from a ventilator attached to her throat. Of course, Kasey simply says cheerily, “Hi, I’m Kasey.”
“Everyone’s dead, aren’t they?”
“But we’re still here,” Kasey says.
“What happened? Terrorists?”
“Maybe.”
“God?”
Kasey replies, sensibly, “I hope not.”
The woman begs Kasey to “pull the plug.” But Kasey continues speaking with her. The woman tells Kasey that Kasey is a survivor. Then the woman closes her eyes and falls asleep.
After a fade to black, the filmmakers cut back to the dive where Marcus died, only this time it is Kasey who dies and Marcus who drags her to the boat. In voiceover, Kasey explains, “Sometimes I think that I’m the one that really drowned that day, not Marcus. The roles were reversed. It was never him, it was me. Marcus is off somewhere, living his life, and here I am, stuck here, not knowing I’m dead, lungs filled with salt water, just another victim of the ocean. But if only I could wake up, maybe I would find peace waiting for me, waiting to take me away like a current in the gentle breeze.”
Despite her voiceover, however, Kasey opens her eyes in the hospital room. She looks down and finds out she is holding a literal plug — she has assisted with the older woman’s suicide, apparently not even realizing she has done so.
Of course, she pulls the sheet over the woman’s head. Then she steals some portable air tanks from the hospital.
When she answers a dead man’s phone, she is told by his parents that they are in a bomb shelter nearby, so she offers to bring them oxygen tanks from the hospital. As she approaches their house, she tragically sees a dead bird floating in their swimming pool. (She has a quick, surreal vision of Marcus in a wetsuit waving at her from the bottom of the pool.)
Perhaps confusingly, she knocks on the door of the house, even though she knows the parents have isolated themselves inside a bomb shelter. She leaves the oxygen and their son’s phone on the steps and walks away.
As she continues toward her parents’ house, she has a dream where a man asks if he can call her an ambulance (“Okay…you’re an ambulance”) and she sees her parents breathing normally in front of a cornfield. When she wakes up, she finds the man who called her an ambulance dead in his pickup truck, so she steals his first aid kit, but there is nothing useful inside. She sits down next to her car and records herself saying profound final thoughts: “People think they mean something to the world, but when they die the Earth watches with indifference, or even worse doesn’t notice them at all. I’m recording this so I’m not completely forgotten. There’s nothing worse than having your whole life wiped from memory.” She also hypothesizes that the no-oxygen crisis is related to trees and photosynthesis somehow.
She then holds the gun to her head. But she doesn’t pull the trigger. Coughing, she loses consciousness.
She wakes up in what appears to be an empty greenhouse. A man in a lab coat named Lawrence walks up to her and introduces himself. “The air in here is perfectly fine,” he tells her. He also tells her that his team found her because of the USB drive, which had a GPS tracker, that she found tied to a balloon. He also explains that the chip on the balloon was collecting bacteria samples, and when the air (or oxygen) disappeared there was a spike in the number of bacteria species collected.
Of course, Kasey says she still needs to find her parents and her child. Lawrence and the only other person at the facility, a young military man, allow her to leave in her car with her scuba tanks, presumably refilled. She drives to her parents’ farm and lets herself into the farmhouse. Tragically but not unexpectedly, she finds her father dead in his armchair with the TV showing old videos of Kasey’s childhood. Her mother is dead in the kitchen. Even more tragically, in a heartbreaking scene, she finds her baby has also expired, though of course the filmmakers sensitively avoid showing the results directly.
In the end, Kasey leaves the house. She has a vision of Marcus, who tells her to drop the oxygen mask and just breathe. The film freezes, ending ambiguously as we never find out if Kasey gives up or not.
The End
Air is emblematic of everything good and decent about this era of democratized filmmaking. The film may not be “good” by common cineplex standards but it is a heartfelt, high-concept piece of work made by people coming together to make a movie and realize a vision. Someone had an intriguing (if a bit odd) idea—what if all the oxygen left the atmosphere and only a handful of people survived because they were breathing artificially—and they ran with that idea as far as they could go. There are limitations, obviously, but there is heart and commitment…and they made a movie. That’s a lot more than most of us have done. And the ending is truly unusual, melancholy, and touching. Imperfect, to say the least, but still remarkable.