This French techno – thriller was one of those pleasant and completely unexpected surprises. An exciting and until the last moment tense and dynamic film about a young engineer and analyst Mathie (Pierre Niney) employed by an aviation agency whose task is to investigate black boxes after plane crashes. Mathieu is a sound engineer, technician and craftsman who will have the thankless task of analyzing the black box of a new French plane that crashed over the Alps, killing about three hundred passengers and crew members. The situation is all the more strange as his boss Victor (Olivier Rabourdin) has simply disappeared and the details he will reveal to Mathieu will become increasingly disturbing.
An additional complication is that Mathieu’s wife Noemie (Lou de Laage) works for a company that produced the latest type of aircraft, such as the one that crashed over the Alps. Although at first it seems that this is a terrorist attack that will be authoritative enough to close the investigation, Mathieu will find many things strange and will continue to investigate the contents of the black box and analyze sound recordings. It is not clear to us whether Mathieu is paranoid, whether he may have lost his mind completely, whether he has strayed and why he is not so obsessively giving up the investigation. The story unfolds fine here and it will seem that nothing is as it seems at first.
Although, as far as I could see, “Black Box” or “Boite noire” (thankfully) wasn’t filmed based on real events, and yet the greatest value of this exciting thriller is that everything here seems very real. This is another in a series of current stories about corporate greed, lack of regulation where it is desperately needed and cynical knowledge of what people are all ready for today because of money. It is a film after which the viewer must imagine how far this technology has gone and what is possible today. And is everything new that is coming really better than what is current. Rating 8/10.
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