Sadly Over-hyped

As Good As It Gets

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The logic of the prologue to this film is astounding. The narrator says that there have been a huge number of UFO sightings and if only 1/2 of 1% are true, then them's A LOT of aliens out there. Huh?! Unassailable logic, right?!The film is done in a semi-documentary style. This makes it look rather official and real. The story is about an Airforce flight that claims it saw flying saucers. Glenn Ford and Bradford Dillman are in it but don't have a heck of a lot to do. You also get to see a pre- "Starsky and Hutch" David Soul. It lost my interest after a while...and even if I believed in UFOs, the film was extremely high on talk and light on action. Pretty dull, actually and not a film for Ford fans. Let's just pretend he didn't make this one...

A radar plane (the titular Flight 412) on a routine training mission out of Whitney AFB suddenly spots three unidentified objects on its radar. The objects are confirmed by ground radar. Marine fighters are scrambled. But just as the jet fighters get close , the planes suddenly disappear from the radar – followed shortly by the three unidentified objects. Afterwards, Flight 412 is rerouted to a secret facility where its four man crew are subjected to an interrogation about what they've seen. Or as the men are continually told, what they "think" thy might have seen. Colonel Pete Moore (Glenn Ford) sets out to find his men and bring them back home.As hard as The Disappearance of Flight 412 strives to have the look and feel of a documentary, it never pulls it off. Instead, the movie comes across as exactly what it is – a movie of the week masquerading as a serious look at the U.S. government's cover-up of UFOs. For example, the movie makes it seem like the men on Flight 412 crack in one night with a minimum of hardship or discomfort. Good thing these guys weren't in combat. They'd have given away every secret the U.S. had in a week's time. It's not a very realistic portrayal of these well trained men.In addition to the problems with the plot, The Disappearance of Flight 412 is never able to shake its made-for-TV origins. The sets look cheap, there is absolutely no originality as far as the cinematography goes, no special effects of any kind (the UFOs appear only as bleeps on a radar screen), and, other than Glenn Ford, most of the rest of the cast will be familiar to anyone who watched TV in the 70s. Not that the actors do a bad job – quite the opposite in fact. The acting is one of the movie's highlights. David Soul, in particular, gives a really nice performance. Other familiar faces in the cast include Guy Stockwell and Bradford Dillman.In the end, I'll call The Disappearance of Flight 412 a slightly below average experience. As such, a 4/10 seems about right.

An Air Force training mission is lost shortly after take off and a small squadron of UFOs are spotted on the radar screen as the planes disappear. Glenn Ford plays the concerned base commander, desperately trying to track down the crew he sent along for flight control. This crew has been abducted to a seemingly abandoned military facility in the desert by a special intelligence division, where the men are being brainwashed and otherwise coerced to participate in an enormous, and largely unexplained UFO cover-up.The film succeeds in developing a military feel, but the characterizations are not consistent in this regard, and several absurdities and military stereotypes occur. It falls far short of creating the 'documentary feel' it strives to achieve, and - even worse - provides no motive or even a fleck of believability for the silly conspiracy theory that forms its basis.Most of the acting is OK, and the script and plot are, though inconsistent, OK. The cinematography is tedious standard 1970s TV movie fare - the camera generally does not move except for a few pans. Fortunately, the lack of inspirations is fairly consistent from the subject matter itself to the production values, so there is no need to be very concerned if you haven't managed to see this one.

**SPOILERS** Four years before the 1947 Roswell Incident was made public in 1978 a film came out about a fictitious UFO cover up that had all the hallmarks of what was really going on in the US military, notably the US Air Force, for some twenty years. On a sunny summer day a radar plane took off from the Whitney AFB and got caught up with what the US Government has been keeping under the rug since the end of WWII: Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's). Are they or are they not real? from another solar system do they come from? and are a danger to the national security of the United States? The crew of the radar plane spots by sight and their radar system as well as it being confirmed by ground radar an eerie and frighting sight. Three unidentified flying objects moving threateningly towards their plane! Two marine jet fighters are scrambled to confront them or, if necessary, shoot them down. As the fighter jets come within cannon fire of the strange objects they either disappear or are themselves shot down by the UFO's who then make an incredible right angle turn, almost at a standing position, and shoot out of sight at speeds, clocked by the radar equipment on the plane and ground control, of up to 5,000 MPH. What happens next is what we've learned over the years since the movie was made. The radar plane is diverted to an obscure and abandoned air field, the old Digger air base, and the pilots debriefed by members of the SID, Special Intellengence Detatchment. And made to see things the the way the military wants things to be seen, and have the entire incident filed away and forgotten. Four months later the same kind of UFO incident happens again at the same Whitney AFB and those who suffered through the first one at the start of the film had by then learned their lesson and said of the incident what they were told to say from their higher ups. Not what their eyes and brains told them what they saw and what they knew to be the truth. Even though UFO's are still considered by many in the news media as mass hysteria at worse or the results of an overworked imagination at best they are real enough for the US military to have covered up and stamped Top Secret and Eyes Only thousands of documents about these elusive objects since at least back to 1947, which shows what those who are in the know really think about them. The incident that happened in the movie "The Disaperance of Flight 412" is not unique to those who served in the USAF over the last fifty or so years. With intelligently flown aircraft being spotted all over the USA, as well as the entire planet, unopposed with those responsible for the safety of the people not being able to stop them or shoot them down It's no wonder that the government doesn't want this information, if true, to become public.