The Pilot
I
tried to write something with a simple story and I envisioned the action in
this being simple and realistic-ish like this movie Taken that I saw and most people liked more than I.
The film
opens with standard air traffic control chatter as the credits appear on the
screen along with images of daily airport activity. The sequence gradually streams down to one
big passenger plane approaching Munich, Germany. The pilot is Mike (played by Aaron Eckhart)
and he gets cleared to land and lands.
It is dusk. He tells his co-pilot
to have a good one and we get all sorts of long shots of Mike strolling through
the crowd at the airport looking sexy but serious in his pilot’s uniform with a
cap and big aviator glasses that make him look more nondescript.
He goes to a
loud trendy nightclub and appears to be watching this one well-dressed older
German guy (Udo Kier) laughing with a bunch of other guys who look like
businessmen. He surveys the club and
sees some bodyguards standing nearby.
The guy goes to the toilet and while he’s in there the bodyguards don’t
let anybody else go in. Mike grabs a
bottle of champagne and approaches the bathroom area. While the bodyguard is telling one guy he
can’t go into the bathroom Mike slips by and goes in. The bodyguard quickly scrambles in after Mike
but Mike is waiting just inside the door and trips him, smashes the bottle on
his head knocking him unconscious. The
German businessman scrambles out of the toilet stall and Mike shoves the broken
bottle into his throat and then slips out a window in the bathroom and bolts
through a back alley goes back to his hotel room and shakes it off.
We get an
accelerated group of quick scenes of him waking up the next day, looking at
himself in the mirror and then showing back up at the airport and flying a back
to Chicago giving his usual cheerful pilot’s spiel. Then him back in his home in Chicago where we
get a scene like the one in Heat where DeNiro looks goes out to dinner
with all the other guys and sees that they all have love and families in their
lives on this will just be Mike with other airline pilots, not other
killers. He’ll be walking home from the
group dinner and a public payphone rings and he answers it and an angry voice
on the other end screams “Mike, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Mike calmly
retorts “I’m getting righteous. What
are you doing?”
The voice
responds “I’m watching you!”
Mike says ”Enjoy
the show.” And hangs up.
Cut to the next
day of Mike doing his pilot’s spiel for a flight to Australia. We get a long wordless sequence in which we
see the plane land in Sydney Australia.
We see him rent a car and drive way out into the country, pull over and
park his car hidden from the road. He
moves through the hills and stealthily approaches a big luxurious one-story
house partially under construction out in the middle of nowhere. He’s able to sneak past a couple of guards
who don’t look like they really expect anybody to ever come here. He gets into the house (the front door is
unlocked). He silently stalks the
house’s owner (Al Leong) by hiding in closets and stuff. Leong goes into the bathroom and is taking is
a piss but keeps sensing something is wrong.
He keeps looking around him while pissing and the camera movements will
deceive us into thinking Mike might be in the room with him. We then cut to Mike in the next room feeling
the drywall for its softness and then looking over at a long piece of narrow
pipe. The next shot is the pipe flying
through the wall like a spear and stabbing Leong in the lower chest area as he
stands there pissing. He gasps to make a
sound but can’t. He reaches for a pistol
stored behind the toilet but can’t quite reach it. Mike then lets himself into the bathroom and
pulls the shower curtain off the rings and wraps it around Leong’s face
suffocating him.
In his final
moment of life Leong finally reaches the pistol and pulls it out from behind
the toilet but only to have it snatched away by Mike. Mike walks down the hall and out the back
door where he uses the pistol to shoot a guard who is just standing on the
veranda in the back of the head. He
quickly puts the pistol in the guard’s hand and positions it to look like the
guard for some reason shot himself in the head.
Mike bolts off over the hill and gets in his car and drives back to
Sydney.
He lets himself
into his hotel room and two men in black suits are waiting for him and speak in
American accents. They verbally abuse
Mike telling him they know all about his little vigilante missions and that
they consider it an insult. Through
expository conversation they reveal that Mike was an accountant in an
international money-laundering syndicate but turned state’s witness and got
into the witness protection program where they paid to retrain him as a
pilot. Mike’s testimony was only able to
help get convictions against the members of the money-laundering ring who
happened to be in America. The FBI guys
tell him should be happy with the amount of justice his testimony was able to
bring. Mike explains that that wasn’t
enough and so now as a vigilante he can go beyond the jurisdiction of the FBI
and take down his own former money-laundering ring to make up for his years as
a criminal. The FBI guys tell him his
actions are illegal and a threat to the witness relocation program. They tell him to stop and he tells them that
his work is almost done.
They part ways
angry and the once the FBI guys are alone the one starts fuming that Mike’s
actions are an affront to everything they’ve tried to do for him and the FBI
can’t afford to ever be seen protecting an individual such as this. They decide to leak Mike’s whereabouts to his
former crime syndicate and let them take him out.
Mike arrives back
home in Chicago and is entering his apartment building and gets to his door and
just senses something is off. He presses
his ear against the door, takes out his mobile phone and calls his own house
and hears that the ringing inside briefly startles an assassin into shuffling
his feet on the hardwood floor. Mike
turns around and goes down the stairwell and peaks out a window to see the back
alley is empty. He heads out the back
alley and quickly hails a cab and goes to a hostel and checks in and sleeps
there. A few days later he goes to the
airport incognito with a big trench coat on and a bit of a beard and only
changes and shaves once he’s safe inside.
He gets into
the cockpit of his plane and makes some banter with his co-pilot and then they
take off. The flight goes to
Brazil. In the middle of flying he’s
chatting with the co-pilot and the co-pilot slips some comment about Mike being
a traitor and then tries to kill him with a tazer. The two wrestle around until Mike dominates
him and kills him with the tazer. Mike
sits him up in the seat so that he looks normal and completes the flight.
He lands and
quickly goes to clear security in the airport where they tell him there’s a
phone call for him. He takes the phone
and the voice on the other end tells Mike that he shouldn’t be alive to be
answering this call but they’ll get him eventually.
He uses a bunch
of deceptive techniques of keeping in crowds and looking down to get out of the
airport. He gets into a taxi but
somebody sees him and fires a pistol at him and it hits him. The cops tackle the gunman and Mike in the
taxi peel out before they can get to him.
Mike’s bleeding in the back of the taxi and the driver is yelling at him
and Mike opens a briefcase of money and throws a roll of cash at the driver
which pleases him and he shuts up.
The taxi lets
Mike off at a smaller airport where there are mostly just broken down
Cessnas. He goes in to the
administration shack and arranges to rent a Cessna. He shows them his pilot’s license and they
give him the keys to the hangar. He
discreetly glances at his wound in his side and then down at his suit case and
then at the dude behind the desk and leaves the suitcase full of money for the
guy beside his desk.
He goes out and
gets in the plane and flies off. We cut
to some gangsters doing cocaine on a yacht and one of them one the phone
screaming about how angry he is that Mike is not dead and got away. Then he sees the Cessna Mike is piloting
approaching and yells at one of his guards to shoot at it, which they do. Mike takes a few more bullets but crashes the
plane into the yacht killing most of the gangsters on impact and causing the
boat to sink out in the middle of the sea.
THE END
If you liked this, try reading these other
creative writings:
This my attempt at writing
a blaxploitation superhero movie.
By request from Renee.
My Ideal Steven
Seagal Picture
I use what I learned from
Vern’s book Seagalogy to try writing a Seagal picture.
Successful trilogizing
complete!