Too many films show characters being killed arbitrarily, as if they were video-game bad guys, rather than dealing with the subject of death as a real, fearsome event.  Director Peter Weir, in the film Fearless, has made an unblinking, unapologetically humanist story about survivors of a brush with death who find the experience to be deeply unsettling.

In the film, Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) walks away from a crash of a commercial airplane, even though his business partner is killed.  He attempts to come to grips with the experience and understand why he survived, and he ultimately learns to live with the fear and accept life.  In the process, he helps a fellow survivor, Carla (Rosie Perez, nominated for an Oscar for her performance).  Carla is numbed by the death of her two-year old son, whom she was holding in her arms during the crash.

The film makes a few comments that are decidedly antireligious.  Klein tells Carla that his father was killed when he was 13, after which he "decided there was no God," since he couldn't understand "why God killed my Daddy."  He goes on to muse that "people don't so much believe in God as they choose not to believe in nothing."  Some religious themes and symbols are used.  Klein becomes a savior for some of the crash survivors, since he helps them escape from the wreckage.  This suggestion is resolved in human terms, though.  The film suggests that those who need salvation should look to other people rather than to a higher power.  

The film has good supporting performances by Isabella Rossellini (Klein's patient but bewildered wife), Tom Hulce (a lawyer obsessed with getting a good settlement from the airline), and John Turturro (a psychiatrist who attempts to treat Klein and Carla).  The direction and camera work of Peter Weir (Witness and Dead Poets Society) gives a surreal, off-balance feeling to the film that matches the disorientation of the main characters.

There are a few flaws in the film, for example that the characters' lives before the crash are not contrasted to their uncertainty afterward.  Overall, though, it is well worth seeing.  The film did not do well in movie theaters, perhaps because of the antireligious sediments or because it was hard to promote without making it sound depressing.  It is rated R for mature themes and some intense scenes of the violent crash, although there are no sexual situations.