Pilot Frank Towns (Quaid) and his faithful sidekick AJ (Gibson) fly into deepest Mongolia to airlift the crew of a oil drilling station, including the humourless company boss (Laurie), the feisty project director (Otto) and a collection of brave and/or stubborn colleagues, as well as a nebbish stranger (Ribisi) who claims to be an aerodynamics expert. When they crash in the vast desert, the survivors realise their best hope is to rebuild a plane from the wreckage. Hopefully before nomadic smugglers find them.

It begins promisingly, with sharply drawn characters who clash against each other and the situation. Moments of understanding and compromise, as well as potentially fatal disagreement, pull us into the story. And the principal cast is very good (the others become either interchangeable or bull-headedly stuck on one personality trait). Quaid holds it together effortlessly, as if he actually believes the awful dialog he's asked to spout. Ribisi adds a wonderfully sinister subtext with his Young Hannibal routine. And Otto has the film's pluckiest, most involving role--and also its most thankless.

The first problem is production design. While the epic landscapes and debris-strewn crash site are fine, the characters are shot in over-lit close-up--it looks like it was filmed in a studio with a painted (or computer-added) backdrop. Moore's direction is a little too choreographed. The action scenes are fairly spectacular, but so flawlessly realised that we can't believe them. And then he adds a little Outkast karaoke-dance scene in the middle, as if he needs to break the tension and make us smile!

But even these things would have been acceptable if the film didn't subvert itself with a series of mind-numbingly stupid story elements--corny twists, ludicrous coincidences and, worst of all, extremely lame speeches ("We're not garbage, we're people!") that make us cringe in real horror. In the end it's watchable, but only just.