.. Flightplan & Charlies Angels Comparative Analysis

Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is a propulsion engineer based in Berlin, Germany. Her husband David died from falling off the roof of an avionic manufacturing building, and now Kyle and her six year-old daughter Julia are flying home to Long Island to bury him and stay with Kyle's parents. They fly aboard which Kyle helped design. After falling asleep for a few hours, Kyle wakes to find that Julia is missing. After trying to remain calm at first, she begins to panic, and Captain Marcus Rich is forced to conduct a search. Kyle walks the aisles, questioning people, but none of her fellow passengers remembers having seen her daughter either. One of the flight attendants calls in to the airport they just departed from and, shockingly, the gate attendant says that they have no record of Julia boarding the flight. In addition, according to the passenger manifest, Julia's seat is registered empty. When Kyle checks for Julia's boarding pass, it is missing. The story then unfolds at this point of the film.

Moreover the synopsis of Charlie’s angels is: The "Angels", three investigative agents (Barrymore, Diaz and Liu) who work for the Charles Townsend Detective Agency, return for another high-octane series of adventures as they investigate the theft of a database of witness protection profiles, after five of the people on the list are murdered. They're aided by a new Bosley (Bernie Mac), in an adventure which pits them against a "fallen angel" (Moore), their old nemesis, the Thin Man (Glover), and others.

Representations:

Firstly Jodie Foster is represented as a strong and independent women throughout this film, the same way Barrymore, Diaz and Liu are throughout Charlie’s Angels. The one thing that both of these films have in common when looking at representations of women are that; in Todrov’s theory all females are represented as heroes throughout their movies, Jodie Foster is shown to be the hero as she will not give up on looking for her daughter throughout the film and is when finally successful at this, this portrays her as the hero in the film, moreover in the film Charlie’s angels the three young women are also portrayed as the heroes in this film as they are secret agents which shows their objective throughout the movie is to eventually save someone or something.

In addition, as I am looking at how post feminists will look at both of these films, both films will have the same views. Throughout both films the women in the films take on more of a “masculine” role. E.g. in Flightplan when Jodie Foster is answering questions about the engines of the plane to her daughter, this can be seen as the fathers role however she is playing it, also in Charlie’s Angels they are playing more of a masculine role as their jobs are investigative agents and as their roles of characters the fights with men and situations they get into connote to the audience the masculine role they have to play.

Furthermore with the enlargement of feminism and post- modernism, the media has created this post-feminism trend of gender swaps. Now in the media powerful male role-models are represented as having a feminine side, e.g. The Game Plan starring Dwayne Johnson also known as the Rock (caring father who takes on the mother role in the film).

Both movies have similar narrative plots; as both main characters are on a quest to find someone and become heroes, making sure nobody gets hurts, although there are some deaths in both movies to enhance the audience and also connote to the audience the genre of the film. Nevertheless in Charlie’s Angels it can be argued that there are some stereotypical views throughout the film, as it can be argued that the outfits the three women are wearing are very revealing and portrays them as “sex objects” however in contrast to this, this can be argued that in order for the women to achieve their goals, they must be willing to do anything to achieve what they want to achieve.