The Eyjafjallajökull Volcano Twist
Halfway through Redirected's first act, just as the four-man crew has cleared the London heist and is on the chartered flight to Malaysia, the script invokes a real-world event to reset the entire film. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption — an event most of the audience would have personally remembered from five years earlier — grounds the flight and reroutes it to Vilnius. The volcano is the plot's elegant turning point. This page covers what the volcano really was, how the script uses it, and why the device works as cleanly as it does.
The real Eyjafjallajökull eruption
Eyjafjallajökull is a small Icelandic glacier-covered volcano that erupted in stages between March and June 2010. The eruption's volcanological scale was modest. Its position under a glacier produced an unusually large volume of fine ash, and the prevailing winds carried that ash across the entire airspace of northern and western Europe.
The aviation consequences were severe and immediate. From 14 to 21 April 2010, most European airports were closed. Smaller closures continued through May. Estimates of the affected passengers reach ten million. Airlines, cargo operators, and dependent supply chains lost hundreds of millions of euros. The disruption was the largest peacetime shutdown of European airspace in history.
What made the eruption useful for filmmakers was not its volcanological significance but its narrative shape. It was big enough to be a real event, brief enough to be a self-contained plot interval, recent enough to be remembered by 2014 audiences without exposition, and geographic enough to affect anyone in Europe simultaneously.
How Redirected uses it
The Redirected screenplay treats the eruption as a narrative reset button. Without the volcano:
- The gang's heist succeeds.
- The chartered flight clears European airspace.
- The film becomes a British heist-comedy that ends on a Malaysian beach, or sets up a sequel, or follows the gang into Southeast Asian criminal territory.
With the volcano:
- The chartered flight is grounded along with every other flight in the region.
- The plane is diverted to the nearest viable airport, which the script places in Vilnius.
- The film becomes a Lithuanian-set culture-clash road movie, which is what Vėlyvis was actually interested in making.
The volcano picks the location for the script without the script having to argue for it. There is no exposition required. The 2014 audience watching the film sees a news bulletin or hears a character mention "the ash cloud" and immediately understands. The geographic axis of the entire production turns on one historical event.
Why the device works
Three things make the Eyjafjallajökull plot device unusually clean:
Audience prior knowledge
By 2014, when Redirected released, the Eyjafjallajökull eruption was four years old. Most European adults watching the film had personally been affected by the closures, knew someone who had been stranded, or remembered the news coverage. The script could trust the audience to register the event without explaining it. A screenwriter inventing a fictional volcano would need exposition; using the real one bypasses that need entirely.
Genre fit
Heist films traditionally rely on escape mechanics. Getaway cars, false passports, offshore destinations. The 2010 eruption broke European escape mechanics for weeks. A heist film whose escape route runs through European airspace in April 2010 has a real-world reason for the escape to fail. Redirected exploits this fit precisely. The volcano is not just plot machinery — it is plot machinery that the genre actively wants.
Geographic flexibility
The eruption affected most of Europe simultaneously. Vėlyvis could have set the diverted flight in any number of European cities and the device would have worked. Choosing Vilnius (his home base, his crew, his country) meant the screenplay's reroute happened to land exactly where the production wanted it. Less elegant scripts would need to explain why the plane went to Vilnius specifically; Redirected lets the volcano do that work without ever foregrounding the choice.
The diverted flight as comic premise
Once the volcano grounds the plane in Vilnius, the comic premise of the film falls into place. Four British criminals, none of whom speaks Lithuanian, none of whom can place Lithuania on a map, none of whom has any connections in the country, are stranded with £1 million in cash and the ring of a local criminal. The comedy is structural rather than verbal — it derives from the gap between what the characters know and what their environment requires.
This is the comedy of competence collapse. The crew was professional in London. They become amateurs the moment they walk through the Vilnius airport's exit. The volcano makes this collapse possible without requiring the script to manoeuvre them into Lithuania through any contrived plot device. Real-world disruption does the work that screenplay machinery would otherwise have to invent.
Other films that used the eruption
Redirected was not the only film to use Eyjafjallajökull as plot machinery. The 2013 French comedy Eyjafjallajökull, directed by Alexandre Coffre, used the same event as its direct plot premise. A divorced couple stranded en route to their daughter's wedding in Greece must make their way across Europe by ground travel. The basic setup mirrors Redirected's, but the tonal register is much gentler.
For the broader treatment of how the eruption became a cinematic plot device, see our editorial on films that used Eyjafjallajökull as plot.
What the device tells us about the script
The decision to anchor a key narrative turn on a recent real-world event is unusual for the heist-comedy genre. Most heist scripts rely on internal plot machinery — bad luck, betrayal, planning errors. Redirected reaches outside the script's universe for its decisive plot turn. This signals confidence: the screenplay trusts the audience to bring their own memory of 2010 to the cinema, and it trusts that memory to do the work conventional exposition would otherwise need.
It also signals priorities. The film cares more about the Lithuanian middle act than about the heist mechanics. The Eyjafjallajökull device is essentially a fast-forward button — it skips the part of the film Vėlyvis was less interested in (the international escape) and lands the script where he wanted it to be (Vilnius, with British leads, in language-gap chaos). The volcano serves the priorities of the production.