Though it may technically qualify as one on paper, John Travolta’s disastrous directorial debut, “Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” is not a movie.
This adaptation of Travolta’s own 1997 children’s novel of the same name is a stiff, agonizingly lifeless affair. For all the ways it seems to be deeply personal and intent on exploring how people are shaped by the formative experiences of their youth, it feels like it may have actually been directed by an alien discovering human interaction for the first time.
This makes for what can be a sporadically interesting watch, but only because of how consistently baffling this story of a child flying on several planes during the Jet Set era is. Travolta’s film never reaches the emotional heights he’s desperately straining for, crashing down at nearly every turn. It’s a film where there are no real conflicts or characters, no themes or ideas, and what can only barely be called scenes. Playing like an extended fever dream defined by shallow snapshots of memories, incessant narration by Travolta himself, a gallery of cartoonish, one-note characters, and a poisonous, perfunctory sense of nostalgia, it’s a disaster that leaves no survivors.
Premiering Friday at the Cannes Film Festival, Travolta’s film runs into trouble right out of the gate with an animated sequence that looks like a cheap PowerPoint presentation. The rest of the film feels similarly low-rent, with incomplete visual effects and a score that is cloying to the point of obnoxious.
Such shortcomings could perhaps be forgiven if the rest of the film were in some way engaging or thoughtful. Unfortunately, the story of the young Jeff (Clark Shotwell), who is traveling across the United States with his mother and getting to experience flying for the first time, is so empty as to be utterly weightless.
As Jeff encounters various new people along the way, most of them within the narrow confines of airplanes that look like reused sitcom sets, you’re left perpetually waiting for something significant to happen, or to get some sort of indication of what made this trip so special to him. But whatever made this story meaningful to Travolta is never made clear to the audience.
Despite the director telling us about everything we’re seeing and meant to be feeling, to the point of unintentional hilarity, nothing leaves a memorable impact. Rather than invite us to understand Jeff and his passion, Travolta’s writing just makes him a stand-in for the nostalgia he had — and certainly seems to continue to have — for this era. He never feels like a character of any complexity or even an authentic child.
Even as there are a few flashbacks that hint at a more complicated melancholy in Jeff’s life that he won’t understand until later, the moments pass too quickly to register. The characters take off for repetitive flight after flight.
When Travolta himself makes a brief appearance in a bizarrely sudden conclusion (the film only runs 60 minutes), you wonder who this whole project was really even for. Was it for his younger self, meant to be a love letter to youth? Perhaps, but you’d hope that, all these decades later, he would have been able to write a story that actually revealed something about this era in his life.
The potential excuse that this is merely a children’s story and shouldn’t be held to a higher standard doesn’t fly either. After all, plenty of works geared towards younger audiences can still find deeper resonances. This movie just isn’t up to doing so, playing like a slapdash audiobook version of a shallow story.
What began as an already shaky flight not only can’t stick the landing, but seems not to even know what it’s aiming at. Though the final shot — seemingly stock footage of a plane with Travolta again providing one final excessive barrage of awkwardly stitched together narration — makes its way to the ground, the film misses the runway entirely.
“Propeller One-Way Night Coach” will be available to stream on Apple TV starting May 29.