A Story Deserving of a Better Screenplay

Agreed. Tuskegee Airmen was on the same topic, but had a better screenplay. Despite it's lower budget, I'd say it was a better film.

Live long and prosper.

reply share

add reply

formatting help

I feel like Lucas was so blinded by the concept he couldn't couldn't evaluate the pieces.

Lucas was so blinded by his own ego that a better screenplay wouldn't have saved it.

I'm a retired Army officer, but I started out in the Air Force as an F-4 Phantom Weapons Systems Officer (backseater). As I've said on many other threads on this board, to paraphrase General George S. Patton, George Lucas doesn't anything more about aerial warfare than he does about f ***ing! (And George C. Scott may have said "fornicating" in the movie Patton, but the real Patton used the real F-word!)

Lucas was absolutely the worst person in the movie industry to do this movie. This movie is only the latest of many giant steps down the primrose path which Lucas started the world's movie-viewing public with the first Star Wars movie in 1977; I distinctly remember the documentary on the making of that movie, in which Lucas patted himself on the back for patterning his battle scenes after what he claimed to be the most realistic dogfight scenes ever filmed, and at the same time in the documentary intercutting his scenes with those from A Yank in the RAF which were absolutely the phoniest looking flying scenes ever filmed! And he was either too lazy or too egotistical to have bothered to learn jack s**t about aerial warfare in the intervening 35 years; he's just conned most of the whole world into thinking his cartoonish creations are reality when they're the farthest thing from it.

I'm not going to repeat my complete rant here, but my two favorite analogies are 1) that Chuck Jones could've done the special effects and had P-51 Mustangs mimicking the Road Runner and Messerschmitts mimicking Wile E. Coyote, and they wouldn't have been any more inaccurate than what this film ended up with; and 2) that very few people in the world have ever seen a real dogfight, let alone been in one, but most Americans have seen a baseball game; this movie is the equivalent of using special effects in the movie 42 and having each of Jackie Robinson's non-homerun hits zigzag 90 degrees in midair several times all by themselves to get around and past the fielders.

reply share

add reply

formatting help