Of all the animal-themed films in recent years, perhaps the oddest is Snakes on a Plane, New Line Cinema's surprising phenomenon.  This horror-action tribute to B-movies of the past received a stunning amount of free publicity through the internet, where thousands of people latched onto the title as a catchphrase, an in-joke gone global.  Indeed, the words Snakes on a Plane serve as summary and advertisement, a cheeky announcement of the plot. The film hews to its stated ambitions, serving up a diverting romp for audiences exploiting all manner of serpentine themes during its one hundred and five minutes on the screen.

On a conceptual level, Snakes on a Plane presents several deliciously absurd juxtapositions.  Snakes slither, crawl, and otherwise remain tethered to the ground, while airplanes represent humanity's ultimate triumph over gravity.  How would a snake cope, thirty thousand feet above the ground?  Could a cold-blooded creature survive in a pressure-controlled, artificially cooled cabin?  The thematic "hook" of the title, and the film as a whole, revolves around these paradoxes: the unlikely combination of two phobias, one natural and one technological.

In fact, nature and humanity interact throughout Snakes on a Plane. Although most of the film takes place in the air, the initial action occurs in Hawaii, a setting evoking a Hollywood Garden of Eden: pop-rock music, women in bikinis, surfers skimming over the surfaces of rolling waves.  The film's protagonist, Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips), exists as a manifestation of this setting, a chill Adam on his dirt bike and board.  As he drives through the winding roads of Hawaii, the filmmakers linger on the lush tropical landscape.  The original image of nature peddled by Snakes on a Plane, then, is an inviting paradise, enjoyable and, most importantly, non-threatening. 

This idyll ends, as Edens always do, with knowledge.  Specifically, Jones witnesses the murder of a federal prosecutor by organized crime lord Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson).  Kim steps into the movie in direct contrast with nature, dapper in his immaculate white suit and black SUV.  He stands apart -- a serpent in this Eden, who hangs his victim from a bridge like a ripe fruit, before savagely beating him to death.  The camera turns to Jones as his eyes open wide, as if suddenly forced to confront the world in all its evil.  Although the thick foliage protects him from being seen, the kickback of his engine as he escapes draws the attention of Kim and his cronies.  The cat-and-mouse game, with Kim and his men on one side, and Jones and the government on the other, begins.

Expelled from Hawaii, the film's action moves to the sky.  Special Agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) and his partner must fly Jones to Los Angeles to testify against Kim.  Pacific Airlines Flight 121 (the titular plane) becomes a microcosm for the world as a whole, populated with an assortment of characters that run the gamut of human characteristics.  We meet the passengers as they board, presented in simple terms reminiscent of a morality play: the narcissistic heiress (Rachel Blanchard); the unpleasant businessman (Paul Oswald); the conceited rap star and his two bodyguards (Flex Alexander, Kenan Thompson and Keith Dallas); and the devoted, noble flight attendant (Juliana Marguiles).  Simultaneously, we watch as Kim's henchmen fill the plane with crates of snakes, to be released on a timer to cause havoc.

Having been cast in such simple terms, the characters' moral character becomes the overriding determinant in their survival.  Who deserves to live?  Who should be killed?

The moral universe of Snakes on a Plane, we quickly learn, is a sexual one.  The first victims are a couple on their way to joining the "mile-high club" in the airplane bathroom.  The film encourages the audience to equate this licentious behavior with the characters' demise.  We witness their copulation through tinted "snake vision," seeing their bodies as a distorted, writhing mass of heat.  When the snakes do attack, one latches onto the woman's breast, provoking howls of amusement, rather than shrieks of horror.  They had it coming, seems to be the implication.  Indeed, the poor couple's shrieks of horror and pain are misinterpreted by a flight attendant as the thrills of sexual pleasure.  "Those were the days," she sighs, smiling in fond reminiscence.

Sexuality continues to factor prominently in the fates of the passengers as the snakes make their full appearance.  The second victim, a male passenger, suffers a similarly pornographic fate as the first couple: a snake surprises him from the bowl of the toilet, latching onto his penis.  The licentious co-captain, who delights in making inappropriate comments towards his female crewmembers, is also bitten in the first wave of panic.  Snakes slide up women's skirts, making literal and graphic the phallic symbolism of serpents' bodies. 

Indeed, the sexual aspect of the snakes' killing spree extends even further than their choice of victims.  As Flynn searches for a way to stop the snakes, the FBI contacts an expert on the ground in California.  The herpetologist is mystified by the snakes' aggression, telling Flynn, "Snakes don't attack, unless they're provoked."  Eventually, we learn that the flower leis provided to each passenger on leaving Hawaii have been sprayed with pheromones to simulate the mating scents of snakes, throwing them into a frenzy. Thus, sexual desire underpins the snakes' behavior. The use of flowers, with their obvious connotations of female genitalia, as the instigator of the phallic snakes, completes the neat symbolic message of Snakes on a Plane. Not only can sex get you killed, it also stimulates impulses that make creatures kill.

While the animalistic urges of sexual desire bring death, the film presents alternate, "civilized" alternatives in the passengers that do survive.  Both Jones and Flynn find romantic objects with flight attendants.  Neither couple, however, acts on their amorous intentions until the plane has safely landed.  A young mother and her baby are also among the passengers who survive the ordeal and represent the proper result of sexuality.  One flight attendant, an older woman, affirms this message when she gives her life to save the child.  Even the sole male flight attendant, clearly coded as queer during the flight, reveals his true heterosexual self upon landing, leaping into the arms of his girlfriend. 

In the last moments of the film, Jones returns to his beloved ocean, teaching Flynn to surf.  Through its examples of "good" and "bad" sexuality, Snakes on a Plane operates in a similarly didactic manner.  The film affirms a system of sexual morality that is heterosexual, and chaste.  It associates sexual expression with animals and death, and human constructions of relationships with survival and regeneration.  Beyond its paradoxes of earth and sky, nature and technology, Snakes on a Plane offers one final irony: that a film so embraced by the taste-makers of the new so clearly advocates tradition and the old.