The opening of “Black Box” is a head-snapper, and not a little cunning.Over a blank screen, we hear the chatter of air traffic controllers and the crew of a plane preparing to land. A control panel comes into view, and we’re in the cockpit, directly behind the pilots. Once the setting is established, the camera pulls back and doesn’t stop retreating. First class and business class go by. Bathrooms, flight attendants, service trolleys, and passengers tussling with the overhead storage bins are navigated with swift, preternatural surety.At which point, in a cinematic transition that could have only come after the advent of CGI, the camera glides through an air-vent into a darkened space. Where are we? An underground bunker, something like a bank vault replete with flickering overhead lights and steely surfaces. The camera ultimately snakes to the right and settles upon a sizable red box. Inside is the black box of the title.Welcome to the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, a branch of the French government whose job it is to investigate airline mishaps and accidents. The BEA offices will soon be busy: The airplane has crashed; 300 passengers are dead. The head of the BEA, Philippe Rénier (the estimable André Dussollier), puts together an emergency team to uncover what, exactly, happened.Among those not assigned is Mathieu Vasseur (Pierre Niney), a bespectacled audio specialist with an exceptional ability to divine and distinguish sounds. (His ear is the first thing we see of him in “Black Box.”) Vasseur is irked that his supervisor, Victor Pollock (Olivier Rabourdin, the Gallic Tommy Lee Jones), has picked another “wreck tech” to assist in the investigation.Vasseur is a distinctly 21-century character: nerdy and inflexible, precise and possessing the pallor of someone who’s spent too much of life in front of a screen. Having said that, Vasseur is a cinematic type we’ve run into before: think Harry Caul in “The Conversation” (1974) or Thomas, the fashion photographer who inadvertently captures a murder in “Blowup” (1966). In other words, Vasseur is a technical adept whose meticulousness leads him to conclusions the higher-ups are likely to miss — or, for that matter, to quash.He isn’t relegated to second-class status for long. He’s thrust into the spotlight when Pollock goes missing. Then things get murky. Is Vasseur’s boss on a bender or is there something more nefarious afoot? And why are his efforts to get to the bottom of events constantly rebuffed?Curiosity getting the better of him, Vasseur entertains, and acts upon, some uncomfortable hypotheses about the causes of the accident. His wife, the long-tolerant Noémie (the lithesome Lou de Laâge), casts a skeptical eye on Vasseur’s far-fetched theories.The best parts of “Black Box” are the most insidery. Vasseur is an extreme example of a cadre of specialists whose job it is to suss out the particularities of filmed accidents and the recordings that accompany them.Digitized graphics — charts and patterns in a glowing array of colors and patterns — often dominate the screen, and we’re made privy to various computer programs that filter and clarify any and all kinds of sound. Does this type of technology really exist? Who cares, as long as the attendant characters live and breathe by their geekery.By the time Vasseur takes the law into his own hands, “Black Box” turns into a conventional thriller, a McGuffin-heavy essay in paranoia, conspiracy, and espionage. The shift in emphasis isn’t fatal, but it is disappointing. I mean, when Vasseur becomes flummoxed as no one buys into his theories, we can’t help but roll our eyes just a little bit. Even he must have seen this movie before. In the end, director Yann Gozlan proves less inventive as a screenwriter than he is behind the camera. Still, Mr. Gozlan does keep things moving, moving, moving — enough to make for a diverting couple of hours.
