Those magnificent men in their flying machines
Looks like "Stealth" was much sillier than I expected, almost like assuming that "Torque" would be a realistic movie about culture of motorcycle gangs.
In the unspecified near future, U.S. Navy employs three super fighter planes in missions against terrorism. Apparently the lessons of asymmetric warfare still haven't really sunk in this large and bureaucratic organization. Besides, I didn't see these superplanes doing anything that a regular F-18 couldn't have done, since their main mission seems to be attacking guys in jeeps who are armed with assault rifles. Somewhat wastefully, these superplanes operate from an aircraft carrier that is full of regular fighter planes, which don't seem to be doing anything at all. Sometimes the future seems to arrive in a very nonuniform manner.
Of course, I'm not an expert on military, so I can't wait for Steve Dutch to write a review about this movie. Hopefully soon! Even so, I have often wondered about when fighter planes have the name of the pilot embossed on them, since allocating one plane to one pilot just seems so very... inefficient to me. When a single plane costs in the neighbourhood of 30 million dollars, I would make sure that I'd have more pilots than planes, so that these expensive planes would be in full use even during an influenza or stomach flu epidemic. Especially with these newest superplanes that cost perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars each, I would train and keep around more than three pilots. Otherwise it just feels like you were sending a man to shoot somebody and gave him only one bullet for the task.
In the movie, the three superpilots (the cocky top gun, the flying girl and the funky black guy who listens to rap and dribbles his basketball but has the good manners not to lust after the white chick) get a new wingman, a new superplane piloted by a quantum AI which is supposed to learn from them. And not only is the AI new, but the whole plane itself has all kinds of super abilities that make me wonder why they are not already utilized in other Navy airplanes. This feels a bit like in Marvel comics, so that some professor or inventor can build anything at all in his garage but no venture capitalist or the military seems to be willing to mass-produce his inventions.
About this much I understood, but the rest of the movie was so incoherent that I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. Apparently the AI airplane has no morals or insticts, it learns totally wrong lessons about killing the enemies regardless of collateral damage, so it later decides to go against orders and kill more people. I understood that somehow the commander was evil and he had a 24-style evil boss doing evil things which I didn't fully comprehend. When the evil airplane next decides to attack an imaginary facility in Russia, our top gun hero flies after it, and somehow shooting down Russian fighter jets during peacetime deep inside Russia's territory does not cause any kind of international repercussions. I guess it's a nice job to be the world's only superpower and hegemony, if you can get it.
Unfortunately, the funky black guy is splat against a mountain and the flying girl is shot down above North Korea of all places, so that she has to escape the soldiers who are chasing him. Top gun talks the evil airplane to be his friend and fly to an evil corporate airport. Realizing his mistake when the doctor tries to kill him, top gun takes the plane over from the hands of evil corporate henchmen so that he can take it to North Korea to save the girl. Which he does in the nick of time, and the evil airplane realizes its evil ways and atones for them by doing one last suicide mission, therefore saving our couple who realize they love each other. I guess that it is not possible to sexually integrate the armed forces without the whole thing becoming a sex fest.
In the unspecified near future, U.S. Navy employs three super fighter planes in missions against terrorism. Apparently the lessons of asymmetric warfare still haven't really sunk in this large and bureaucratic organization. Besides, I didn't see these superplanes doing anything that a regular F-18 couldn't have done, since their main mission seems to be attacking guys in jeeps who are armed with assault rifles. Somewhat wastefully, these superplanes operate from an aircraft carrier that is full of regular fighter planes, which don't seem to be doing anything at all. Sometimes the future seems to arrive in a very nonuniform manner.
Of course, I'm not an expert on military, so I can't wait for Steve Dutch to write a review about this movie. Hopefully soon! Even so, I have often wondered about when fighter planes have the name of the pilot embossed on them, since allocating one plane to one pilot just seems so very... inefficient to me. When a single plane costs in the neighbourhood of 30 million dollars, I would make sure that I'd have more pilots than planes, so that these expensive planes would be in full use even during an influenza or stomach flu epidemic. Especially with these newest superplanes that cost perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars each, I would train and keep around more than three pilots. Otherwise it just feels like you were sending a man to shoot somebody and gave him only one bullet for the task.
In the movie, the three superpilots (the cocky top gun, the flying girl and the funky black guy who listens to rap and dribbles his basketball but has the good manners not to lust after the white chick) get a new wingman, a new superplane piloted by a quantum AI which is supposed to learn from them. And not only is the AI new, but the whole plane itself has all kinds of super abilities that make me wonder why they are not already utilized in other Navy airplanes. This feels a bit like in Marvel comics, so that some professor or inventor can build anything at all in his garage but no venture capitalist or the military seems to be willing to mass-produce his inventions.
About this much I understood, but the rest of the movie was so incoherent that I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. Apparently the AI airplane has no morals or insticts, it learns totally wrong lessons about killing the enemies regardless of collateral damage, so it later decides to go against orders and kill more people. I understood that somehow the commander was evil and he had a 24-style evil boss doing evil things which I didn't fully comprehend. When the evil airplane next decides to attack an imaginary facility in Russia, our top gun hero flies after it, and somehow shooting down Russian fighter jets during peacetime deep inside Russia's territory does not cause any kind of international repercussions. I guess it's a nice job to be the world's only superpower and hegemony, if you can get it.
Unfortunately, the funky black guy is splat against a mountain and the flying girl is shot down above North Korea of all places, so that she has to escape the soldiers who are chasing him. Top gun talks the evil airplane to be his friend and fly to an evil corporate airport. Realizing his mistake when the doctor tries to kill him, top gun takes the plane over from the hands of evil corporate henchmen so that he can take it to North Korea to save the girl. Which he does in the nick of time, and the evil airplane realizes its evil ways and atones for them by doing one last suicide mission, therefore saving our couple who realize they love each other. I guess that it is not possible to sexually integrate the armed forces without the whole thing becoming a sex fest.
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