7500, the debut thriller from Patrick Vollrath, finds Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tobias Ellis, a calm, contained, decent man in a very difficult situation. He’s a pilot on a German airplane and has a child with his girlfriend, Gökce (Aylin Tezel), one of the flight attendants. His manner is professional and easy. He and the captain, who he has just met, exchange details casually, and they seem like they are going to get along well.

However, they don’t have much of a chance: they are quickly assaulted by terrorists as soon as the plane takes off. The captain is mortally injured, Tobias knocks out and ties up one of the assailants, Kenan (Murathan Muslu), and uses Kenan’s body to block the door to the cockpit, while the other terrorists usher the passengers to the back of the plane. It becomes up to Tobias to handle the situation and land the plane safely. 

Vollrath’s film stands out for its ability to successfully maintain the tension of the basic premise in creative ways. There is a smooth balance between dialogue, action, and silence, and the thriller has an effective and varied soundscape, all of which make the cockpit, in which the film is set, far from dull.

Intriguingly, we see almost all of the action that occurs outside of the cockpit through the security camera. I wondered if Vollrath was intending to make a commentary on how we see so much horror through the mediating presence of a screen. This possibility is left open and, perhaps, not fully explored. Still, there is no denying the impact of seeing several violent deaths through the security camera’s bland lens. 

Most impressively, the fights are clumsy and awkward. I was reminded several times, in a vague way, of several Kurosawa films: the final fight in Rashomon, for instance, or the end of Stray Dog in which actor Toshiro Mifune and his adversary are crawling across the ground. These films do not so much portray combat between skilled fighters as they do squabbles between the frantic and the frightened.

The terrorists in 7500 are just as frightened as their victims. One in particular, Vedat (Omid Memar), is so consumed with fright and doubt that he calls his mother. He and Tobias form a strange and unlikely bond in their difficult circumstances that is, in many ways, the crux of the film. Vollrath’s thriller is infinitely superior to last year’s Hotel Mumbai, which was also about a terrorist attack, because of his interest in the hijackers as actual human beings. 

Still, if terrorism is to be explored with more depth on film, it will need to have a wider scope than 7500 and a director who is willing to acknowledge the violence that has been inflicted on the countries where the terrorists have come from. It would also need to be willing to portray the fear that terrorists inflict on people who are not Westerners. Terrorism is, in short, a subject so complex that even if there is a suggestion of the forces in the world that brought a group to hijack a plane, which there is in 7500, it still does not feel like enough.

These days, it’s easy to feel as isolated as the pilot in the cockpit, but if a movie were to actually encompass the tangle of global forces at play, it will need to expand our understanding of the issues rather than limit it. 7500 is a step in the right direction, but there is still more to go.