Since its release, Charlie Victor Romeo is a film I’ve always wanted to see and never wanted to see. “Always” because it employs a unique creative concept in documenting reality; “never” because that reality is aviation disasters.
For the sake of my blood pressure and anxiety, I was wise to postpone viewing until I’d safely returned home from a transatlantic flight. Sully, this is not.
Charlie Victor Romeo presents six reenactments of then-recent airplane crashes, word for word from transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder, or CVR. (The film’s title translates that acronym via the industry’s phonetic alphabet — one that still annoys me today when I ask my dad, a retired navigator, to spell something.)
The movie is deceptively simple, as actors from the NYC-based Collective:Unconscious portray these black-box recordings in a black-box theater environment. Vignettes run as long as a teasingly stressful half-hour to an alarmingly abrupt one minute.
From severe turbulence and faulty parts to mechanic error and birds birds birds, the cause of each situation varies. At first, it’s reassuring to see the intricate, data-based methods the pilots follow. Then, when danger arrives, witnessing the differences in reactions is terrifying. (Certainly Nathan Fielder had to have seen this before embarking on HBO’s second season of The Rehearsal.)
No narrators, no talking heads and, other than a slide totaling the casualties, no explanations. Charlie Victor Romeo is both forensically sober and fucking intense. Prepare for takeoff all you want, but you’ll never be the same afterward. —Rod Lott