Arka Mukhopadhyay
In a fun genre amalgamation, ‘Blood Red Sky’ mixes the political with the supernatural. Director Peter Thorwarth takes conventions from diverse genres and mingles them to create a brooding environment of dread in the German-original horror-thriller movie ‘Blood Red Sky.’ Nadja is a woman with a mysterious ailment. She boards a transatlantic flight bound to New York with her son Elias, hoping to see a doctor for her condition.
But the atmosphere turns tense as a team of hijackers takes control of the flight. However, what happens afterward makes the hijacking look like Cinderella’s story. The situation inside the plane gets way too bloody in the blink of an eye. The ending marks an explosive end to the ghastly flight, but some questions need further probing. If you find yourself asking these questions, let us break down the finale for you. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Blood Red Sky Plot Synopsis
Transatlantic 473 has apparently been hijacked on its way to New York and has been cleared for an emergency landing on a remote airstrip. Colonel Alan Drummond is overseeing the mission. After attempting to communicate with the hijackers, he prepares his men to infiltrate the airplane and rescue the passengers. As a precautionary measure, he keeps the men on standby and waits for sundown for the strike.
Going back in time, we see events that lead to the emergency landing. Little boy Elias checks in the luggage at the airport counter. Elias’ mother, Nadja, has given him the instruction to go ahead, and she would come later. The bag is too heavy for Elias’ strength, but he gets help from a friendly man named Farid. We see Nadja suffering from a mysterious ailment. After taking some medication, she reaches the airport and presents her additional luggage for checking.
Her bag contains some heavy medication, but she claims to have a prescription for them. While Elias strikes a conversation with Farid, Nadja escapes to the bathroom for applying another injection. They get on the flight, and the camera boards the plane to capture the sinister turn of events that unfold shortly after. A group of hijackers – Berg, Karl, Eightball, and Kurtis – take hold of the plane. They are aided by the new copilot, Bastian Buchner.
Nadja becomes nervous and attempts to escape to the cargo, but psychopath Eightball shoots her. The hijackers have planned the ordeal elaborately, and they take Farid and Mohammed to read an Arabic transcript so that they can make the hijacking look like an Islamist terrorist attack. Unfortunately, the hijackers did not plan for a vampiric encounter. After being bitten by a man in the woods, Nadja has become an undead vampire. When she bites one of the bad guys, he joins the party of vampires. Slowly, the airplane turns into the site of a hellish bloodbath.
Blood Red Sky Ending: Is Nadja Dead or Alive?
In the adrenaline-fueled final moments, we see Elias in a state of helplessness. The army has wrongly deduced Farid to be one of the hijackers, but Elias repeatedly insists on saving Farid from the hoard of vampires. The rational Colonel Alan Drummond does not know anything about vampires being on the plane, and he concludes that Elias is in a state of shock. He keeps his men on standby till sundown, but as night is the ideal time for vampires, Elias urges the colonel to blow up the plane before sundown, but nobody listens to him.
Elias is taken to an ambulance, but when the Colonel knows that there are explosives on the airplane, he greenlights the mission. In wartime urgency, army men break into the airplane, but a diabolical reality reveals itself. The army captures Farid and tries to evacuate him from the airplane. But they have sinister surprises waiting for them. Before the Colonel can understand the course of events, the vampires rise from the dead and infect some army personnel.
Nadja is a vampire in the story, and her character gives the thriller a supernatural twist. For most parts, she stays on the side of the good even though her vampiric appearance freaks some people out. She takes out the hijackers one by one. After biting Karl to death, she moves on to Kurtis and finally takes out Eightball in a gruesome spectacle. But to her dismay, Eightball becomes a vampire, and he is more diabolical in his supernatural element. When Elias rushes to save his mother in the rear cargo, Eightball comes after Elias, hoping to infect him. Elias opens the airplane hatch and throws Eightball into the air. He tries to get back but is burned alive by the sight of the sun.
After the episode, Elias cuts his hand to make Nadja drink his blood. Nadja becomes mobile, but her vampiric self seemingly overpowers her humane instincts. In the final scene, as Elias escapes the ambulance and comes near the airplane looking for Farid, the vampires break loose from the airplane. Elias catches a glimpse of Nadja as she is busy sucking blood from an army officer.
Elias brings out the detonator from his teddy bear and blows up the plane for the lack of a better alternative. It seems that Nadja is dead, but Nadja’s vampiric predisposition rules her death out as inconclusive. She should have already been dead when Eightball shot her, but she unleashes mayhem instead. But the fire is an effective repellant against vampires, and in the aftermath of the explosion, Nadja being dead is more likely than her being alive.
Is Farid Arrested?
We first see Farid as he is in the pilot’s seat. The Colonel, who is endowed with the information that Farid is one of the terrorists, gives him certain directions. Farid pleads him not to shoot while repeatedly maintaining that he is one of the good guys. Going back in time, we see Farid before boarding the plane. We instantly understand that Farid is not a terrorist. The hijacker crew sets up the operation in this way so that it can be passed off as an Islamist terrorist attack. Therefore, they got Farid on board by luring him into a fake convention. Farid gets to know about the conning only when it is too late. The hijackers make him read aloud a terrorist declaration in Arabic and play the record to the Air Traffic Control.
The army, therefore, is sure that Farid is one of the main culprits behind the attack. When the female officer interrogates Elias, he insists that Farid needs to be saved. The Colonel does not pay heed to Elias’ request, and he orders his men to arrest Farid. After breaking into the cockpit, that is what the army people do – they arrest Farid, who is already gravely injured. But then, Elias jumps off a running ambulance to save Farid. After the vampire breakout, Elias is compelled to blow up the entire airplane as directed by his mother. The army is taking Farid away, but when Farid hears Elias’ call, he runs to regroup. In the penultimate moments, Farid embraces Elias, and the Colonel asks his men to let Farid go. Therefore, it seems that he is not arrested, after all.
Why Did the Hijackers Hijack the Plane?
The plane journey would have been quite ordinary — and even Nadja’s ailment would not threaten civilian lives — if it were not for the hijackers. In the early moments of the film, the hijackers take control of the plane, and we sense it to be an inside job, with the copilot Bastian Buchner on the side of the bad guys. They even bring on board two Muslim men to associate the attack with a terrorist organization, with one of them being Farid. Farid reads the transcript presented to him as brave as he is, but he chooses to add that he is forced to read the words. However, after the hijacker shoots a man in front of Farid, he has no other option but to read the transcript as it is. The hijackers die one after another or turn into vampires.
All of that is okay, but why do the hijackers plan the attack in the first place? It seems that they stage the attack to tamper with the air transport economy. As per the movie, a terrorist attack would negatively impact the market, as historical pieces of evidence suggest that airline stocks shoot down after terrorist attacks. A female passenger reminds others about the Real Madrid Fan Club massacre of 2016, which created a similar effect. In an increasingly volatile economic condition, the hijackers may want to try to turn the market (possibly in their stride) by staging the attack. Or maybe they want to change the election outcome by initiating a domino effect that would come in favor of any extremist political leader.
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