Flight 714 (French:
Vol 714 pour Sydney)
Original publication dates: September 1966 – November 1967
First collected edition: 1968
Author: Hergé
Tintin visits: Indonesia (Djakarta), Celebes Sea (the island of Pulau-pulau Bompa).
Overall rating:
Plot summary available here.
Publisher's synopsis:
Bound for an Astronautical Congress in Australia. Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus accept a lift in the private jet of Laszlo Carreidas, the millionaire who never laughs. The plane is hi-jacked, and the millionaire and his guests are landed on a Pacific island, where their old enemy Rastapopoulos awaits them. Using a truth drug on Carreidas, he intends to extract the number of the millionaire's secret Swiss bank account, unless, of course, Tintin can save the day. Comments: After the experimental nature of
Tintin in Tibet and
The Castafiore Emerald,
Flight 714 seems like a return to the more traditional detective/mystery adventures that had previously been a mainstay of the series. However, while it might
seem like a return to a more traditional Tintin story, the book does continue Hergé's new-found penchant for experimentation to a degree, since it takes Tintin and the reader further away than ever before from the authentic realism of the earlier adventures. In addition, the title itself is somewhat misleading since, bizarrely, the adventure is about an interruption to Flight 714, rather than what happens on the flight itself, as the title might suggest.
The adventure originally appeared in serialised form in the pages of
Tintin magazine between September 1966 and November 1967. It was then collected into the standard 62-page album in 1968. By the time that
Flight 714 began its serialised run, it had been four years since the end of the last Tintin adventure. This unprecedented delay represented the longest gap between Tintin stories up to that point. However, it was a sign of things to come, since the gaps between new books would only become longer in the following years. This slow down was caused by a combination of Hergé wanting to take things a little easier as he approached his 60th birthday and his growing sense of boredom with Tintin. His enthusiasm for the character had declined dramatically in recent years, and other hobbies, such as art collecting, had begun to take up a lot of his time instead. Hergé even told his English translators Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper that he had "fallen out of love with Tintin. I just can't bear to see him." With the tremendous Worldwide success of the strip over the previous decades, Hergé was now financially secure and no longer needed to work quite so hard on producing new stories for the series.
It should be noted that the book's Belgian title properly translates as
Flight 714 to Sydney, and nowadays the English version of the book is indeed titled as such. But it was always plain old
Flight 714 when I was a lad. As such, I've decided to retain this truncated English title because that's how I always knew it, dammit! I'll have none of this modern day, fancy-pants, "...to Sydney" nonsense in
my review thread. Now, get off my lawn!
The story begins with Tintin, his dog Snowy, and his friends Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus arriving at Djakarta airport, on their way to Sydney, Australia for the International Astronautical Congress, where they are to be guests of honour. While at the airport, our heroes run into their old friend Skut, who is now working as a personal pilot for Laszlo Carreidas, the so-called "millionaire who never laughs." Carreidas offers Tintin and his friends passage to Sydney on his own private jet, but his secretary, Spalding, seizes control of the aircraft and directs it to a deserted volcanic island in the Celebes Sea. Upon landing, it is revealed that Tintin's old enemy, Roberto Rastapopoulos, is behind the hijacking and is determined to steal Carreidas's fortune.
With Snowy's help, Tintin and his friends escape their captors and are led by a telepathic voice into the subterranean tunnels beneath the island. There they meet Mik Kanrokitoff, a scientist who has a telepathic transmitter that he obtained from an extra-terrestrial race who were long ago worshipped on the island. The island's volcano suddenly erupts and Tintin and his friends are only saved by the timely appearance of an alien spacecraft that picks them up, but not before Kanrokitoff has hypnotised his fellow humans. Tintin and our heroes wake from their hypnosis adrift at sea in a dinghy and cannot remember how they got there. Only Snowy the dog remembers the hijacking and alien abduction...
Of course, it makes sense that Snowy wouldn't be hypnotised by Kanrokitoff, since he's at a different eye height to Tintin, Haddock and the other humans. The fact that only Snowy (who can't "talk") knows that Tintin and co. were onboard an alien spacecraft reminds me of a similar moment in the Star Wars franchise (paging
rossn and
Roquefort Raider!
). In the 2005 film
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, it is revealed that only C-3PO had his memory erased following the events of the prequel trilogy, suggesting that R2-D2 – the only character who can't "talk" – went through the entire original Star Wars trilogy fully aware of the secrets of Luke's linage. You gotta love it when you can tie a Star Wars reference into a Tintin review.
Hergé had recently become fascinated with the existence of alien beings and, in particular, ancient alien visitors who had come to Earth to communicate with our ancestors. This interest fitted in nicely with his passion for other weird phenomena, such as ESP, witchcraft, dowsing, and cryptids, all of which had featured in recent Tintin adventures. But the appearance of a flying saucer piloted by alien beings in
Flight 714 is arguably the biggest "what the f**k?!" moment in the whole Tintin series. And in case there were any doubt in the reader's mind about the authenticity of the flying saucer, Calculus is on hand to quash such ideas when he presents an object from the UFO and announces that it is made of a metal not found here on Earth...
As strange as ancient astronauts might sound, Hergé was very much in tune with his times here. The ancient astronaut hypothesis had become a semi-popular idea by the late 1960s and it became even more popular in the 1970s. At around the time that Hergé published
Flight 714, non-fiction books such as Robert Joseph Grugeau's
One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963), Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan's
Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), and Erich Von Daniken's
Chariots of the Gods? (1968) had all helped to popularise the idea of ancient alien travellers having visited Earth thousands of years ago. The 1968 Stanley Kubrick film
2001: A Space Odyssey plays upon much the same idea.
According to Wikipedia, the "ancient astronaut" concept was first popularised in the book
The Morning of the Magicians by journalists Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in 1960, but actually has its roots in the works of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos stories (in particular the stories
The Call of Cthulhu (1928) and
At the Mountains of Madness (1936)). However, I know that author Arthur C. Clarke had also covered the subject of ancient aliens in his 1948 short short "The Sentinel", which was a precussor to the novel and film
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Many fans of Tintin take issue with the presence of extra-terrestrials in this book, feeling that it takes the series too far away from its pulpy, detective/mystery roots and the realism that had for so long been its cornerstone. Myself, I can certainly see what they mean, but the presence of honest-to-goodness space aliens doesn't bother me too much. After all, we'd already seen giant spiders and exploding mushrooms on the surface of an alien meteorite in
The Shooting Star and encountered the Yeti in
Tintin in Tibet. I just regard the flying saucer as part of an increasing trend in The Adventures of Tintin towards the supernatural and paranormal, and therefore just part of the changing style of Hergé's writing.
Another criticism of the aliens is that they more or less come out of nowhere and represent a convenient
deus ex machina which saves our heroes. To be honest, it's kind of hard to argue against that accusation. The first real mention of anything remotely connected to extra-terrestrials doesn't come until page 41, when one of the Sondonesian nationalists working for Rastapopoulos mentions strange lights in the sky and master-gods in "fire chariots" -- neither of which had been hinted at previously. It all smacks of some uncharacteristically sloppy writing on Hergé's part, to be honest.
Speaking of the Sondonesian nationalists, they are, as I say, working for Rastapopoulos, but their part in the story is rather underdeveloped and we really get very little information about them. Since Sondonesia is a fictitious country, it's really not clear where they come from or who they are actually fighting against back home. I'm not even sure what language they're supposed to be speaking.
As for Rastapopoulos himself, he initially seems nastier and meaner than ever before. For example, the first order he gives his henchmen in
Flight 714 is to kill Snowy! Proving – as if there was any doubt – that he is well and truly Moriarty to Tintin's Holmes...
Despite this noticeable hardening of Rastapopoulos's character, Hergé eventually reveals him to be a rather inept villain. He becomes the source of much humour in the book, due to a variety of humiliating incidents that befall him. This serves to transform Rastapopoulos from the menacing figure of old into a rather pathetic character. Nowhere is this better highlighted than in the scene where he gets dosed with his own scientist's truth serum and proceeds to engage in a childish competition with the mean-spirited millionaire Carreidas to prove which of them is the nastiest person...
Although Rastapopoulos might've been a big time villain in past instalments of the series, here Hergé turns him into a fool. The same goes for his chief henchman, the recurring character Allan, who has his teeth knocked out by the Sondonesian nationalists, transforming him from a genuine threat into a rather pathetic looking, toothless old man. Thus, we get a weird combination of these recurring villains initially seeming deadlier than ever, but eventually being utterly defanged. The book ends with Rastapopoulos, Allan, and the treacherous Spalding all being taken away by aliens to an unknown fate, but it also leaves things open enough for their possible return.
However,
Flight 714 would be the final appearance of Allan and Rastapopoulos in a Hergé-penned Tintin adventure. The author did toy with the idea of having Rastapopoulos return in the unfinished final story,
Tintin and Alph-Art, but since Hergé died before it was completed, it's impossible to know whether he would've actually made an appearance in the finished version of this book or not. However, Tintin's arch-villain was to return one last time in the 1973 film-book
Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, which, while it was fully sanctioned by Hergé, was actually written by Michel Régnier (a.k.a. Greg), who was the editor-in-chief of
Tintin magazine at the time.
One of the things I like best about
Flight 714 it is that it features the return of the Estonian pilot Piotr Skut, who had previously appeared in
The Red Sea Sharks. As a kid, Skut was one of my favourite supporting characters in The Adventures of Tintin, though as I said in my review of
The Red Sea Sharks, I think that had more to do with his dashing appearance than what he actually contributes to the stories. He has a little bit more to do here than in his previous appearance, but there's still precious little character development for him, if I'm being honest.
Interestingly, we also learn more about Calculus's past. It turns out that in his youth he was once an expert at Savate, which is a type of French boxing that combines elements of traditional boxing and graceful kicking techniques. I love that more of the hidden depths of the professor's past are getting revealed with each new adventure; in
The Castafiore Emerald we learned that he had been a balloonist of some repute and here we see that he's certainly pretty tasty in a fight when riled...
Among the new characters that Hergé introduces, Lazslo Carreidas, the millionaire who never laughs, is the most notable. He is a cheat, a swindler, a selfish ass, and an all-round thoroughly unlikeable guy. This millionaire head of an electronics, aircraft manufacturing, and soft drinks empire is first seen in Djakarta airport, and it's hilarious that Haddock initially assumes that Carreidas is a tramp...
Hergé apparently had plans to one day set an entire Tintin adventure in an airport, and the first 9 pages of
Flight 714 are like a practice run for that envisioned later project.
Rastapopoulos's chief scientist Dr. Krollspell was regarded by Hergé as being an ex-Nazi, much like Dr. Müller, who had appeared in the earlier
The Black Island,
The Land of Black Gold, and
The Red Sea Sharks. Despite his sinister background, Krollspell actually ends up changing sides, after realising that Rastapopoulos had planned to swindle him, and ends up helping Tintin and Haddock to evade their enemies. It's tempting to read some kind of anti-Semitic subtext into the presence of Krollspell in the story. Certainly it's a little troubling that Krollspell – a former Nazi concentration camp doctor, according to Hergé – is portrayed as being basically a good chap at heart and certainly less objectionable than Rastapopoulos or Carreidas.
Another new character in
Flight 714 is the space magazine journalist Mik Kanrokitoff, who Tintin encounters when he hears a strange, disembodied voice in his head, guiding him towards some caves beneath the island. Kanrokitoff is equipped with a telepathic transmitter and he matter-of-factly explains that he visits the island twice a year to communicate with extra-terrestrials who have been coming to Earth for thousands of years. Personally, I find Kanrokitoff to be quite a dull creation and, really, he's more of a convenient plot device than a fully realised character.
Still, the subterranean adventure in the tunnels, with its ancient temples and statues that resemble modern day astronauts, is a nicely atmospheric section of the book. On page 43, Tintin remarks to Haddock that the weird light which illuminates the temple is similar to the light they saw in the Inca caves in
Prisoners of the Sun, which in that instance came from phosphorescent lichen...
This is certainly not the not the first time that Hergé has included an underground sequence in a Tintin story: he had done so before in
Tinin in America,
The Black Island, and the aforementioned
Prisoners of the Sun. However, the subterranean sequence in this book is more reminiscent of the numerous underground adventures present in the Blake & Mortimer books by Hergé's old friend Edgar P. Jacobs. I definitely get a sense of homage or "tip-of-the-hat" to Jacobs in this sequence.
As we've come to expect from Hergé and his team, the artwork in
Flight 714 is utterly superb. The detail in the artwork, particularly the backgrounds, is incredible. For example, on my most recent read through for this review, I noticed that Hergé had inserted the wrecked hulks of fighting craft, left over from Japan's WW2 occupation of the island, into some of the backgrounds.
For example, in the panel below, I think that's a half-sunken landing craft just off of the shoreline...
And there's some kind of wrecked tank or amphibious vehicle in the background of this panel...
And the rusting hulk of a gunboat(?) is clearly visible here...
There are plenty of other glimpses of military wreckage left over from the Japanese occupation of the island to be found in the book, proving that Hergé's fastidious attention to detail hadn't diminished with his waning interest in Tintin.
While we're on the subject of attention to detail, the Carreidas 160 jet is another masterclass in comic book realism by Hergé. He wanted this aircraft to be as realistically rendered as his earlier moon rocket had been. However, he left the actual design work to his younger colleague at Studios Hergé, Roger Lelop. Lelop was an aviation enthusiast and aircraft expert, so its not too surprising that he managed to design a totally viable supersonic aircraft. The Carreidas 160 was so painstakingly executed, that cut-away technical plans for the jet were published as a double page spread in
Tintin magazine in 1966...
As an aside, I find the Carreidas 160 an interesting indication of just how long the Tintin strip had been running by this point. The boy reporter had flown in a pre-World War II, propeller-driven plane in his first adventure,
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, and now here he is onboard a supersonic passenger jet!
The exciting scene where Spalding and his fellow hijackers land Carreidas's hijacked jet on the island is stunningly drawn and must represent some of the best artwork that Hergé and his team ever produced...
To sum up,
Flight 714 was another one of those Tintin books that was a real favourite of mine as a kid. Reading the story again, it certainly is a highly entertaining, gripping, and well-told story. It really zips along at an exciting pace. For me, the presence of extra-terrestrials isn't a deal-breaker at all. Yes, the book does raise more questions than it answers, but personally, I don't mind that. Really, I quite enjoy the surreal nature of it all. On the surface, this is much more like the classic Tintin adventures of old, but on the other hand, it could well be the strangest Tintin story of them all.
Flight 714 is a weird hybrid of a hijacking/kidnap adventure and a science fiction story, but personally, I like that mix a lot. Your mileage may vary.