Hijack's real-time flight premise poses a problem
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Hijack spoilers follow.
When scrolling through the latest offerings of TV shows to get lost in, one revolving round a long-haul flight is probably towards the bottom of the list of experiences you would be eager to recreate.
Between the tight legroom, the awkward toilets with a flush that sounds like a black hole opening and the foamy spongey matter masquerading as food, not much lends itself to the rigmarole of flying by commercial aircraft.
Yet that is where Hijack puts us for a full seven-hour flight, told over the same number of episodes. Instead of watching the thriller on a seatback TV, the passengers are living it after a ragtag group of shouty hijackers takes over the cockpit.
With the length of the Dubai-to-London journey replicated in the show's run-time, in-flight moments like the seatbelt sign chiming off and the flight entering new air space every so often are meticulously timed.
Hijack eschews flashbacks, slow motion or anything that deviates from the realistic feel of events in the recreated steel tube plane carriage, which the creators built "millimetre for millimetre" to replicate a genuine airliner, executive producer Jim Field Smith told Digital Spy and other press at a launch event for the show.
But despite the lived-in pressure-cooker feel of the recreated plane cabin, it's hard to muster enough feeling for the characters to care whether or not they dodge the bullets the hijackers keep threatening them with – in part because of the show's dedication to authenticity.
Show writer George Kay said the thought of doing a real-time depiction of the hijacking came when comparing flight durations and typical TV show run times. "We've all been on what would feel like interminable plane journeys," he said, perhaps inadvertently drawing attention to a flaw in the show's premise.
"But it would be suddenly a very short intense and magnified experience if you're under a hijacking, so it just felt right this length of the show seems to be the length of the flight." That and the fact Apple TV+ would struggle to cancel the show part way through, co-creator Smith joked.
The show that Hijack's premise immediately brings to mind is Kiefer Sutherland's star vehicle 24, which embraces the concept of real-time storytelling with a literal race against the digital clock, which would flash up on the screen at intervals during the hour-long drama.
Yet while 24 could make the most of advert breaks to plausibly cram all the boring bits of life in – being stuck in traffic, needing the toilet, slurping coffee – in the age of streaming, this Apple show has no such luck.
Instead, Smith said he wanted to "feel the tension" of these small cracks in time.
"Moments that in any other situation would be completely inconsequential feel like the most important thing ever," he said. "Like Sam's character waiting for someone to move slightly, so they're not in his eye-line any more, so he can go this way."
Hijack does indeed manage to find tension in some of these quiet, boring beats, but the issue is that we have little investment in the people who are doing them. In the first episode, the show is desperate to jump the gun, even if the hijackers themselves are reluctant to get on with it so early into the run.
The fact that the plane is suddenly under siege 40 minutes into its flight leaves us with little initial grounding of who the handful of passengers we're introduced to are, and that's out of a total of 200-odd on the Kingdom Airlines A330.
So when characters like an Egyptian ex-military man are revealed hours into the flight to push the plot along with some new knowledge, you're left feeling that bloke sat behind Nelson has just conveniently been invented on the spot.
Another by-product is that when a passenger does finally fall victim to the are-they-real/aren't-they-real guns, once you know it isn't Elba's character who's been felled – because of course it isn't – you quickly lose interest, because it's just one of the faceless hundreds aboard who only just cleared the screentime threshold to be given a name.
Nobody is their best self on a commercial airline, but the characters we do superficially meet are all rather unlikeable.
There's the weary family in economy, with a son who really should turn off the obnoxious sound effects on his Switch. Then there's the sentient-stereotype marketing man sat next to Elba's Nelson. And we have the silver-haired pilot who thwacks his co-pilot in the face to let the hijackers into the cockpit.
It really is a delightful bunch. Even Nelson is mainly trading on Elba's own charming Idris Elba-ness to get us to care about him and his mission to "get home to his family".
Hijack asks us to spend the duration of a real Dubai to London flight caring about whether these characters live or die, but the hologram backstories for those on board means you care more about why the hijackers bothered with all this in the first place.
Although the real-time rituals of flying are initially well done, the latter stages of the season have the feel of existing for existence's sake. The show is at least one episode too long, begging the question of whether charting the whole flight was done for the sake of a television gimmick as opposed to narrative necessity.
Meanwhile, the counter-terrorism efforts on the ground seem to be a means of cutting away from the plane when not much is going on.
Even Elba joked about finding the Kingdom Airlines journey interminable, describing how the experience of shooting the show over months and months "felt like flying to Mars".
He laughed: "I was like, I'm still on this flight six months later? Are we still here?". Does anyone really want to feel like they're experiencing every minute of a long-haul flight, even if they're only doing so through a TV?
Hijack only narrowly avoids consigning itself to the 'We never asked for this' filmmaking realms alongside the likes of Netflix's heist thriller Kaleidoscope, which you can watch in any order for no real reason other than that you can.
Instead, Hijack is the kind of far-fetched nonsense you would absentmindedly switch on while on a flight, to become wrapped up in something while the hours slip away. Although in this instance, that’s probably the one time you won't want to watch it. And the hours are hardly going to slip away when each minute has been precisely meted out.
The first two episodes of Hijack are available to stream on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes released weekly.
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