Snakes on a Plane

By Drew Millard

Has society gone completely bonkers? Are we out of ideas already? Pop culture has only existed for essentially maybe four hundred years, and in the last twenty-five years, it seems that we’ve been starved for new ideas, especially in the realms of both music and movies.

In regards to popular music, the most groundbreaking band of the millennium has probably been The Stokes, who sound exactly like The Velvet Underground, a band from 1967 who nobody liked at the time and everybody loves now, even though they’re only marginally listenable to, unless you’ve just shot up some heroin. Point is, no new musical ground has been broken since 1991, when N.W.A. introduced gangsta rap to the world with their opus “Straight Outta Compton.” I doubt the majority of my readers have heard of anything in the preceding paragraph, because The Strokes pander to those who smoke cigarettes behind rock clubs, and N.W.A.’s target audience happens to actually live in Compton.

The movie industry has not fared any better. At all. Every movie ever made is indiscriminately getting the remake treatment, from The Longest Yard to The Omen to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, sadly enough, and it seems like Adam Sandler is starring in a good half of them. Even our best ideas for horror flicks are lifted from foreign culture—the recent horror hit The Ring is just a rip-off of a Japanese film entitled Ringu, which was wholly original. It seems that the Japanese people are making good use of that no-war clause in their constitution.

What the lexicon of movies really needs is a fresh, groundbreaking idea involving something that has never been thought of before.

Which brings me to Snakes on a Plane, a recent film starring the latently transcendent Samuel L. Jackson. Its plot, simply, is as follows: There are snakes on the plane. Samuel L. Jackson must get the snakes off of the plane. That is the plot. Never before have deadly animals and travel mixed so deliciously, and that’s even assuming that the dogs in Homeward Bound were in any way dangerous.

Of course, the movie contains countless nuances, such as in the way the movie’s star disposes of said snakes (whipping, stun-gunning, stabbing, burning, microwaving, to name a few) and the locations in which the snakes bite their victims (such wholesome locations such as private parts, throats, posteriors, eyeballs, etc.) and the varied and colorful vocabulary that its characters employ (I’ll spare you the actual language, but let me promise you: The movie works very hard to earn its “R” rating.).

All in all, the movie adds up to an unbelievably awesome ride best enjoyed in the company of others. The audience in the screening I went to clapped whenever Samuel L. Jackson appeared on screen, killed a snake, said the “f” word, or did almost anything at all. At the climax of the movie, Jackson’s character resolves to shoot out the airplane’s windows by saying his most popular line, containing not one but two instances of a certain twelve-letter modifier. A line that, if one has paid attention to the buzz surrounding this movie, one should be intimately familiar with.

Now, is Snakes on a Plane (or as it is known in some circles, SoaP) a truly great movie? No. It is, however, wildly entertaining. I predict that this movie will reach a cult status similar to that of Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with people dressing in character—as flight attendants, Samuel L. Jackson, a gigantic snake, et al—and reciting lines from the movie to boot. And I will be at every showing I can slither to.