Into Thin Air

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Script, Acting and Direction
Review: This 1985 made-for-television movie holds up extremely well for today's audiences. It's not your average missing person story. Director Roger Young skillfully crafts a suspensful and heartwrenching story through the use of an excellent script and top-flight performances.

Honest, likeable, and repsonsible 19-year-old Brian Walker (Tate Donavan) just "falls off the map" while driving his van to college in Colorado from his home in Ottawa, Ontario.

Despite valiant efforts by his mother and brother (Ellen Burstyn and Sam Robards), no one in the law enforcement community has the time or inclination to thoroughly investigate one of the thousand missing kid cases. This leads to Burstyn and Robards teaming up with a private investigator (Robert Prosky) to finally find Brian's van, and ultimately Brian.

Burstyn, Prosky, Robards, Patricia Smith (as Prosky's wife), and even Donovan (with limited screen time) are all magnificent. John Dennis Johnston is especially creepy as the man who kidnaps Brian.

Although we all know what the ultimate outcome will be, the suspense and heartbreak are still palpable every step of the way - particularly in the last 15 minutes of the film.

This is a top notch TV movie.

Rating:
Summary: don't go vaning alone in Nebraska
Review: This 1985 TV movie is compelling due more to the path leading to the find of a 19 year old Canadian student who heads off from Ottawa alone in a van to drive to Colorado but goes missing in Nebraska, than the sledgehammer direction of Roger Young. Although this story is said to be true, credit must go to writer George Rubino, particularly in downplaying and omitting most of the cliches of the genre. There is the ubiquitious drama about someone wearing an article of the missing boy's clothes, but thankfully it is skimmed over quickly. As the boy's mother, Ellen Burstyn has 2 good scenes, one where she has an angry outburst at a police station, recalling Shirley MacLaine's hospital scene in Terms of Endearment ("Give her the shot!"), and the second when she emits animal noises on discovery of her son's trashed van. Also good is Sam Robards as her other son, and Robert Prosky as a private investigator Burstyn hires. The treatment comments on the "jurisdictional complexities" which unnecesarily burden missing person investigations, and makes out that the police and FBI were blundering incompetents in this case. There is also a postscript that tells us hundreds of teenagers go missing every year without trace, a bleak and dour note to end on, though perhaps in line with the fate of the boy.