Red Tails, movie trailer

George Lucas (as well as Steven Spielberg) has always been an aviation nut. Not only their movies are replete of aircraft scenes (raiders of lost ark, the last crusade, Always, Empire of the sun, saving private Ryan,....etc.), but his Lucasfilm software development house was responsible for flight simulators (1942 Battlehawks and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe).


One small criticism is that if memory serves, at one point in one of the trailers, a P-51 is flying head-on onto a -262 and then executes something like a Kulbit! or at the very least some insane deflection shooting.


Well, that aside, it looks like it should be a great movie, with some of the best cgi dogfight scenes ever made. Can hardly wait.
 
One small criticism is that if memory serves, at one point in one of the trailers, a P-51 is flying head-on onto a -262 and then executes something like a Kulbit! or at the very least some insane deflection shooting.
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I vaguely remember seeing an episode of Dogfights on youtube where there was some narrative of a pretty similar event , this P-51 pilot did a similar maneuver ( pulling something like 12 g ) and just fired by instinct, blindly at a Me-262 which was coming from behind i think (he probably couldn't see anything and couldn't see the Me).

Can't remember if pilot who did that was Red Tail or not. Maybe the movie scene is based on reality , or is just fictious ( but added in coz it looks cool...)

Anyway , looks like some very nice CGI, i really hope that for once they get the airplane types and subtypes right (hands up who is fed up with various trainers masquerading as german or japanese types, four blade Spits fighting in the Battle of Britain , or those hideous HA-1109s with german markings! )
 
Saw long-form TV ads this week on NASCAR and NFL coverage. Release date 1/20/2012. Looks like a lot of fun.
 
Still full of all the bullshit clichés that Hollywood thinks comprise warfighting: speeches in every briefing, jokey banter in place of operational talk, pictures of sweethearts being more important to pilots than knowing the current oil pressure of your engine, masses of gasoline drums ready at every point to burst into giant balls of flame whenever a bullet hits something, obstacles overcome by mere enthusiasm, etc, etc. Of course if they actually showed what flying is really like then the audience would be stunned by the beauty of the sky and if they showed what war was really like they would be completely disorientated and scared senseless. None of which is probably a very good idea to make money out of a movie. But it would be a worthwhile change from these ‘Pearl Harbour’ type nonsense films.
 
http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/tuskegee-airman-john-edward-allen-dies-1.233309

RIP
 
Saw the movie a few weeks ago with it's unconvincing flying footage courtesy of the computer geeks at ILM. Like Abraham said, the movie contains every aviation and war movie cliché and every racial bigotry cliché. The flying and air combat sequences look like cut scenes from a video game. The score by Terrence Blanchard is totally inappropriate for the film.

Battle of Britain (1969) holds up much better with flying sequences shot in the United Kingdom and Spain using real Spitfires and CASA 2.111 bombers from a B-52 Mitchell serving as a camera platform. There are also miniature photography sequences that look better than ILM's CGI in Red Tails.
 
I was lucky enough to cross paths with one of the Tuskegee Airmen last year. Lt. Col. James C. Warren was at the same event and toward the day's end I was in the same area he had a table at doing signings. While in the area I overheard him bantering with the other pilots and authors there, who he seemed to already know.


They were giving him a full ration about being "all Hollywood now that Speilberg made a film."


He was having none of it.


He had NOTHING good to say about "Redtails." Nothing at all.


I thought that rather telling.


I've watched a portion of the film and found it rather excruciating. What really amazed me was how much better the HBO's 1995 treatment of the subject was. This, on a vastly smaller budget. And, interestingly enough, with a number of the same actors too!


You'd have thought that the "master storytellers" - Spielberg & Lucas - could have gotten it right as it was ground previously tread. Hell, they couldn't even be bothered doing the right CGI for the aerial scenes - the Red Tails wound up escorting B-24s far more often than 17s.


Yeah, the movie was a rather lame and embarrassing thing for a subject that deserves much, much better.
 

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