Martin Sheen plays a judge task with overlooking a simplistic case involved in extraordinary circumstance.
A couple of East Berliners plan to cross the Iron Curtain.
To accomplish this they need to fake a vacation to Poland acquire forged identification and then fly out of the country to the city of West Berlin where they can hopefully find amnesty with the United States Army.
But things go awry and one of their major contacts sells them out by having one of the East Berliners arrested for forgery and leaving the other three to fend for themselves. so the remaining East Berliners board their plane anyways and the father of the three decides to take a stuartist hostage as the force the plane to land in West Berlin so they can claim amnesty in the first place.
Which means that they're technically out of the Communist sphere of influence but are now subject to International, American and German law as to their kidnapping of the plane.
Which leads to a case where the defendants could be prosecuted and shipped back to East Berlin for their crimes.
To make everything more complicated the procedures for this kind of case are left ambiguous with in West Berlin because of its occupational status. West Berlin does not belong to the German government, the Soviet government nor does it represent itself. Instead it's considered a holding of the United States. A kind of conquered territory from World War II that still falls under American military law.*
Or at least that's the big picture of the case. There's even talk of Americans losing their standing in the territory if they don't take direct and assertive action.
But we don't spend a lot of time on that subject and most of the film is relegated to was the actions of this one East Berliner justified in his attempts to acquire freedom for himself and his family and were any of his actions considered illegal in the eyes of the West German people.
To which the ending of the movie concluded that only one action was technically guilty and that was taking a hostage. The Easter Berliner held a fake gun to a woman's head demanding that they land the plane less he shoots her.
The gun itself was a mere toy made for children that he had snuck on board by giving it to his daughter while going through customs.
It's a solid film. Martin Sheen makes for a pretty good judge and everyone else plays their role relatively well.
There's nothing over the moon about anything. It's just a solid enough legal drama.
I'm sure somebody with a legal degree could roll through the entire film with a comb and pick out every little and inaccuracy that doesn't technically work was actual court procedures, but you can do that with literally any movie.
There's also a Side Story involving the 4th East Berliner being held back in communist Germany but his story is so insignificant and indifferent to the rest of the movie that it doesn't really matter. It's just there to show us that 'hey this other guy still kicking around and the court case could determine how this sentence is going to turn out too.'
Especially given that he's pretty much doomed to either be in jail for the rest of his life or possibly executed especially when you've got Soviet officials breathing down his neck.
*So in the real world West Berlin is actually part of West Germany and does have a lot of its own representation but it still Falls in an awkward Gray zone when it comes to migrants or attempted hostage situations in an attempt to seek Asylum.
And a lot of its problems would still fall under the United States military who was the primary defensive measure there at the time.
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