What do Samuel L. Jackson, a Boeing 747 and a 20-foot-long Burmese python have in common? Well for one thing, if you get in their way you'll probably die. But more importantly, they are the three key ingredients for a cinematic phenomenon that's exploding onto movie screens across the nation at midnight Thursday. This phenomenon has the most devastatingly unambiguous title in the history of film: "Snakes on a Plane."
Those four fateful words were first posted in the "upcoming films" section of Samuel L. Jackson's online filmography nearly two years ago. Since that time, those words have spawned no fewer than five online fan sites, several flash animations, a series of popular t-shirt logos, a music video, an "Entertainment Weekly" cover and a line of expensive jewelry.
And that's just the beginning. At press time, the "Snakes on a Plane" entry on the Internet Movie Database has 1,740 discussion threads, with titles ranging from "Will 'Snakes on a Plane' outgross 'Titanic'?" to "Snakes on a Plane 2: Planes on a Snake." Indeed, the anticipatory buzz for this film seems to have reached such a fever pitch that some devoted fans have already begun the vigil outside the box office to purchase tickets for the premiere.
"This movie is going to be a cult classic," explained Max Bentovim '08. "It's either going to be an exceptionally good thriller or a campy laugh-a-minute comed, and either way I can't wait."
"There's definitely some biblical and sexual aspects to it that I'm excited about as well," he added.
Like many others in the Dartmouth community, Bentovim plans to attend Thursday's first available screening of "Snakes on a Plane." He said that he hopes to see Samuel L. Jackson's character discover an anvil while onboard the plane and utilize it in his snake-killing endeavors.
Jackson plays Neville Flynn, an FBI agent assigned to escort a key witness in a murder trial from Hawaii to Los Angeles. To stop the witness from testifying, a hired assassin smuggles a crate of deadly snakes onto the same plane as the witness, then unleashes them at an altitude of 30,000 feet. The assassin probably could have saved time by just shooting the guy, but no matter -- the premise is surely no more than an understandably streamlined set-up for the sheer campy delight promised by the title.
This ingenious concept allegedly originated (as such concepts often do) during an after-hours barroom conversation between several tipsy Hollywood producers trying to come up with the worst possible idea for a movie. Producer David Berenson claims to have originally suggested the idea for the movie as a joke, but some combination of alcohol and unwarranted enthusiasm must have caused his colleagues to misinterpret his ravings as genius.
Within days a script had been drafted with the working title "Snakes on a Plane." The script was then, some say through an act of fate, passed along to Samuel L. Jackson, who reportedly agreed to it without reading anything other than the title. Jackson would later threaten to walk off the set when studio executives suggested changing the title to "Pacific Flight 121."
"I didn't even read the script -- I just saw the title, 'Snakes on a Plane' and said 'Okay, good. I'm there,'" Jackson said. "You have got to love that. That's exactly what it is -- 500 poisonous snakes released on a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles. It's fun!"
When it became clear that Samuel L. Jackson's next film would indeed be called "Snakes on a Plane," the unpretentiously zany concept ignited a growing subculture of internet-surfers who became increasingly obsessed with the unreleased film. Some say the combination of big-studio finance with a Z-grade premise and an actor like Sammy J fulfilled the unrealized dream of movie fans everywhere. Others suggest that the concept's deliberate deconstruction of post-Sept. 11 fears through the vernacular of action camp appeals to some unspoken cultural need.
"'Snakes on a Plane' relates to American post-9/11 anxiety about flying, but simultaneously it recalls 1970s exploitation films and the constant interest in the limits of cinematic representation and pop culture," Tyson Kubota '07 said. "And it's snakes on a motherf*cking plane!"
As the director of the Dartmouth Film Society, Kubota has printed the number of days remaining until the release of "Snakes on a Plane" on the weekly meeting notes for every DFS meeting since the beginning of Summer term. He predicts that the movie will gross $150 million on its opening night alone.
"I hope to see lots of scenes of people having sex while snakes attack them," he said. "You know, people joining the mile-high club while snakes bite them."
Perhaps the most fascinating development in what can be legitimately considered the epic saga of "Snakes on a Plane" came on March 24, when New Line Cinema announced that it had authorized a week of expensive reshoots in response to the massive level of internet-based fan interest in the film. IMDb reported that the reshoots added "more gore, more deaths, more nudity and more snakes to the finished product," effectively raising the film's original PG-13 rating to a full-fledged R.
Even more enticing, the reshoots added a shot of Samuel L. Jackson bellowing out the line "I have had it with these motherfcking snakes on this motherfcking plane!" This now-legendary phrase originated not from the pen of any screenwriter but from one of the more popular "Snakes on a Plane" flash animations that had been circulating the internet at that point, thus marking the first time in history that fan input had a direct influence on the finished product of a movie after its original completion.
As Bentovim put it, "The audience is actually preemptively changing the movie before they've seen it to match their desires."
Alex Howe '08, another "Snakes on a Plane" devotee, is considering writing the term paper for his literary theory class on this phenomenon. He described the topic as "a post-structural analysis of the concept, centering on the fact that the finished static product was altered by the studio for no other reason than the strength of completely organic grassroots internet reaction."
"[Snakes on a Plane] strikes me as the kind of movie that my friends and I would jokingly toss around as impossible, but beautiful if it were ever real," Howe said.
Howe's sentiments are echoed by an ever-growing cult of movie fans, Samuel L. Jackson followers and ophidiophiliacs across the nation, who are awaiting the release of "Snakes on a Plane" with quivering anticipation. If you fancy yourself brave enough to sit through what's sure to be a hokey horror-fest of slithery delight this weekend, then here's a piece of advice: in the immortal words of the movie's tagline, "Sit back. Relax. And enjoy the fright."
