At the end of the movie Jimmy Stewart/Dennis Quaid, playing the wiley veteran pilot, has 5 chances to fire up the engine and rise from the ashes.
After a couple of failures, he states that he’s going to use one of his remaining resources to “blow the carbon out”.  Before anyone can stop him from lowering the odds of success, he triggers the mechanism and black smoke billows out of the engine.  Then, on the next try, the engine coughs, sputters and roars into action supplying the power needed to lift them out of their dilemma. 

As cyptic as this may seem to those of you who haven’t seen either version of the movie, the message is simply this:

No matter what the circumstances, sometimes we need to stop trying so hard and expend some energy just to clear our heads.

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