The film Airport contains everything an audience could want in two hours and fifteen minutes suspense, romance, drama, and comedy. The movie shows events that take place at Lincoln Airport and on a plane that is bound for Rome. Mel Bakersfeld, the manager of Lincoln Airport, must deal with the worst blizzard in a decade, a wife that wants a divorce, and a major runway blocked by an airliner stuck in a snowdrift. The runway must be cleared in order for Bakersfeld's brother-in-law, Vernon Demarest, to land a plane that has just had a mentally disturbed passenger blow himself up in the bathroom. .
This movie uses many variations of the split screen. In one scene Mel Bakersfeld is talking on the phone to his wife and we see them both with a split screen but his daughter also gets on another phone to talk to him and then the screen is split three ways. In another scene Ada Quonsett had escaped from Peter Coakley so Mel had the Airport security to look for her. The four corners of the screen show the security looking for her while the middle of the screen shows the people in the airport. In the scenes where the captains of the plane are communicating with the control towers, we see the person they"re talking to in a circle between the two pilots. Although there is many interesting forms of the split screen used, sometimes I feel that they become a distraction. .
I think the film did an excellent job of portraying the lives of the characters andthen showing the audience how these events effect the finale. For example, in the beginning of the movie we see a plane get stuck in a snowdrift and at the end of the movie we realize that the plane must be removed in order for a bomb-damaged jetliner to land. Had the runway not been cleared many passengers could have been hurt. Towards the middle of the movie we meet a security guard who is very good at catching people trying to smuggle items.
