Ground Control (1998)

The success of a movie can be dependant upon many things. First and foremost is a compelling story. People watch movies for the stories. The people who make movies are storytellers. The story is the backbone of any movie and, as such, might be the most important part to the success of a movie. But, when it comes to telling the story, there are a whole slew of elements that work together to bring the story to life. Each one has their place in building up an entertaining narrative.

When it comes to a story, there must be characters doing things for it to move forward. There must be characters who interact with one another, have motivations, and grow. The audience must be able to relate with the characters, empathize with them, or pity them in a way that builds a connection through the screen. Why would someone want to watch a story where nothing happened? They wouldn’t. That’s why fleshed out characters are important to a story.

I know that opening was kind of dull.. But I’m getting to the point. Some stories thrive simply on moving the plot forward. The more action there is, the more twists and turns that happen, the more exciting people find it to be. The same could be said for characters. The more focus put on the characters, the more audiences will connect with them, and the more invested people will be in a story. They are two sides of the same coin.

Ground Control, a 1998 movie, helped to highlight how important fully-formed characters were for building an interesting story. On New Year’s Eve, a group of FAA air traffic controllers went up against some of their biggest challenges ever. They were given extra air traffic to control. A storm was coming in. A lack of funding meant that their equipment malfunctioned on a regular basis. It was a night filled with trouble in the sky. The air traffic controllers were the only people who could help keep the airways safe.

The key to the success of Ground Control was the character work. The movie was mostly a one location film, taking place primarily within the air traffic control center. There wasn’t a whole lot of visual action going on. Things happened on screens, or through people talking to one another. It was much more of a character interaction movie than a visual action movie. Thus, the characters had to be strong to carry the audience from the beginning through the end. I want to spend this post going over the characters, how strong they were, and how they interacted to make something more entertaining than it could have otherwise been.

Jack Harris (Kiefer Sutherland) was the main character. He was a disgraced air traffic controller who had left the business. There was a tragedy five years before the main events, and Jack was at the center of it. A plane crashed after running into some trouble in the air. Jack couldn’t save the plane. Over one hundred people died in the crash. It hit Jack so hard he quit his job and became a video game programmer. Specifically, he was programming an air traffic simulation game. His return to proper air traffic control was the crux of the movie.

T.C. Bryant (Bruce McGill), on the other hand, never left the business. He was Jack’s friend, who had also been working the night of the tragedy. He knew there was nothing Jack could do but didn’t know how to help Jack move on. The best he could think was to bring Jack back to the job. On New Year’s Eve, Jack came back because T.C. really needed the help. He was short-staffed and over-worked. Jack wanted to help. Now it was up to T.C. to protect Jack from the Human Resources type guy who wanted Jack gone.

That human resources type guy was Murray (Michael Gross). He took it upon himself to ensure that everyone was calling the air traffic in a way that was safe and by the books. No mistakes were allowed. If any of the controllers made a single mistake, Murray would ensure that they would never call any air traffic again. When I say he took it upon himself, I mean it. One of the characters, I think T.C., mentioned later in the movie that Murray was one of only three people in the history of the FAA to volunteer for that position. He was that kind of character. He didn’t care about the people. He only cared about efficiency.

Another character who didn’t care about people was Cruise (Robert Sean Leonard), one of the air traffic controllers. He made sure to tell people that he considered all the planes and the people on them to be numbers. If he saw them as people, he would care too much, and he wouldn’t be able to do his job as well. It was all about seeing it as numbers and dots moving around, rather than people with lives that needed to be kept safe. Air traffic control was essentially a game to him. He would learn by the end, through the actions of Jack, that the people mattered. The people were who they were doing a service for.

There was one new person that night at the air traffic control center. Julie Albrecht (Kristy Swanson) had her first day at the job be the toughest night that anyone there had seen in years. She came in, tried to do her job, and couldn’t quite get it. Luckily, Jack was there to give her a few pointers. He was calm when teaching her, making sure she knew that a strong voice would help keep the pilots in line. Otherwise, the pilots would take matters into their own hands and there would be a likelier chance of air collisions happening. Julie learned a lot that night, watching how the different controllers did their jobs.

Someone else who was watching over the controllers was Susan Stratton (Kelly McGillis). She oversaw the air traffic control facility. It was her decision to take over some of the airspace from another center. Nobody agreed with her. She did it anyway. She kept pushing them to do more and more work, to the point where the facility ran into some major electrical issues. Things were shut down for a time. Luckily, she had John Quinn (Henry Winkler), the handy electrician, there to fix things. He made sure the controllers didn’t have to stick to analog systems to track air traffic.

Those were the main characters of Ground Control. They were the people who were being followed throughout the movie. It was thanks to the work of building those characters and making them feel like actual people that the movie succeeded. The story wouldn’t be half as engaging as it was without having those fully formed characters to follow. They each got their own miniature story arcs that were interesting to see play out as the story of that one fateful night wound on.

Going ahead, there will be some spoilers for Ground Control. I want to show how the characters were a strength of the movie by giving examples of their growth. To do that, the whole story may need to be referenced, which means that important twists and turns might come up. You have been warned.

Jack was the main character of Ground Control and his story was pretty straight forward. At the start of the film, he had left his air traffic job to make a video game about air traffic control. He hadn’t lost his love. The tragedy had simply hit him too hard to give him confidence working in the control center. He was willing to give it another try, though, because T.C. needed his help. PTSD from losing the plane came up throughout his New Years Eve shift. He would be calm and collected until his mind would wandered to that tragic night. It hampered his skills multiple times as he closed up while directing traffic. Luckily, Jack got to shake off the PTSD by proving himself later in the night. Another plane was in dire need of saving after suffering a serious electrical malfunction. Jack stepped up, saved the plane, and proved that he could do it. He got over his traumatic experience by saving the people on the current plane.

His story was part of T.C.’s story. T.C.’s goal was to get Jack back into air traffic control. He was saddened by the sight of his friend staying out of the field he loved. The other side to his story was dealing with the overworked, understaffed air traffic control center. He had to keep things together throughout the night as trouble kept coming up. He had to oversee everything with more traffic than he had seen in a long time. And he had to rehabilitate his friend into the job and help train a new employee. This all came to a head during the climax, when T.C. had to take his star controller, Cruise, off of the control set and put Jack, the PTSD-ridden controller, on in a final attempt to save the plane. It worked out. The plane was saved, Jack felt better about his skills as a controller, the night was completed without any deaths, and Cruise learned an important lesson. More on that later.

The new employee, Julie, learned how to find her confidence. Early in the film, she was having trouble with a section of air she was monitoring. She was overwhelmed because she had been thrown into a major position of responsibility on her first shift, and her nerves were getting to her. Jack stepped in to help build her confidence, teaching her that if she sounded confident over the headset, the pilots would listen to her. If she sounded nervous, the pilots would take matters into their own hands. Witnessing the different ways that Jack, Cruise, Amanda (Margaret Cho), and Sam (Ruben Paul) directed planes quickly taught her how to do the job. Shadowing each of them while also stepping in to do the job herself let her find the way that was best for her. It gave her the calm strength to do the job day in and day out. She was also one of the few people present to see Jack pull off the miracle directing of a plane to the runway after it suffered massive power outage, which showed her how important it was to connect with the pilots. They were people and needed to be treated as such.

That was the lesson that Cruise needed to learn most. He saw everything as a simulation of sorts, ignoring that there were real people involved in the air traffic. They were numbers and dots to him. When the plane experienced power failure during the climax of the film, he considered the odds and decided to let the plane go down somewhere that the casualties would be minimal. When Jack stepped in to give a risky option that might save everyone on board, Cruise tried to control the plane his way. His numbers and dots attitude didn’t comfort the pilots at all, who began to panic. Jack had to jump in to give his personal connection touch and save the day, showing Cruise that the people behind the communication systems mattered. They weren’t just numbers and dots. They were real people. Cruise may have had the most important arc of all the characters.

Again, I want to say that Ground Control wouldn’t have succeeded half as much without the strong characters that were brought into it. Cruise, Amanda, and Sam had heard about Jack’s tragedy and had their opinions of him. Julie was hit on by Cruise and shut him down. T.C. protected his people from Murray because, like Jack, he saw people as people and not statistics. Everyone played off each other in a way that was believable because they each had a role to play. The characters had histories. They had personalities. They were fully-formed and it lifted the movie above what it could have been.

That said, Ground Control wasn’t a great movie. It was maybe a tad boring in moments. It would have been worse without the strength of the characters, though. That could be said for a lot of movies. The two biggest parts of a story are the plot/action and the characters. The best of both worlds would have strength on each front. There would be a strong, driving plot and good character work. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. It’s still better to have one of those elements be strong than none. Ground Control had strong characters. It just didn’t have the strong, driving plot. And that’s how it ended up featured in this blog.

Now let’s get to some notes and get out of here:

• Ground Control made Michael Gross a five-timer for Sunday “Bad” Movies. His other four movies were Cool as Ice (week 348), Tremors (week 360), Tremors 2: Aftershocks (week 360), and Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (week 360).
• Jack Plotnick made a quick appearance in Ground Control. He was also in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (week 80).
• Bruce McGill was in both Exit Wounds (week 93) and Ground Control.
• Henry Winkler returned from Sandy Wexler (week 231) to appear in Ground Control.
• Finally, Ground Control featured Kristy Swanson from Mannequin: On the Move (week 378).
• Have you seen Ground Control? Do you think clear characters are important for movies? Let me hear your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments.
• If there’s a movie that you think I should check out and cover for Sunday “Bad” Movies, drop it in the comments or find me on Twitter to let me know. I’m working on the next part of the schedule right now, filling in the last few slots. You might be able to sneak a movie in there.
• Make sure to visit Instagram for some more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• I’m not looking forward to next week. I’m ringing in the new year in a big way. Think about two years ago when we were pre-pandemic. What was a big movie topic at the time? Yeah, I’m going to watch Cats. This isn’t my first time. Or my second. Or even my third time. This is my fourth time watching Cats, I think. First time covering it here, though. You’ll be able to see my thoughts next week, as I try and figure out what a jellicle is. See you then.