I carefully avoided the hype, and I actually think I will enjoy its result.
There's a reason Samuel L. Jackson asked the movie makers to stick with their working title. He knows his audience, and knew the name itself would launch a thousand blogs.
Here's his most important line from the movie: "You know all those security scenarios we ran? Well I'm smack in the middle of one we didn't think of."
This allows his character, Nelville Flynn, to act like Errol Flynn, a swashbuckling hero.
And that's what the USA seems to need now, on the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We need terrorists on a plane that we actually can't reason with, and that we actually can stomp on.
Sam used the bloggage to set us up for our catharsis, here. We get a passion play, with just enough elements of the real thing, that we can gasp and scream, and take out a little revenge. Everyone would like to guess how they would react if they were on board a doomed airliner, when the men in the 1st class section suddenly strap on their red bandanas. Using snakes as a mockup for terrorists simplifies the implied moral decisions.
-- PhlIp
Until a minute ago, I thought it was "Snakes on a plain", which sounded a bit dull!
The snakes in the plain prey mainly on the brain.