Red Tails spoiler

Dambusters? I sure hope not. Do we really need another WWII flik? I'm hoping Mr. Jackson sticks to his passion for the WWI birds and goes that route. I'm sure it would be better than 'Flyboys' (which wasn't really that bad, but not up to The Blue Max standards).

Finally saw Red Tails today, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Hollywood compresses the the truth and mello-dramatizes history.  They bend physics when they have to to get it all in the frame.  They also morph fact into legend, and always have.  That's what they do.  This is a story worth telling, and worth watching, inspired by true events (which disclaimer is splashed upon the screen at the very beginning).  As the reporter tells Jimmy Stewart's character in the last scene of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, "When legend and fact differ, print the legend."

My six year old grandson watched it with me, and he was mesmerized.  He began asking me questions about WWII, a first.  Then he asked me if that was the war I was in, and I explained the difference to him, that I wasn't born until four years after WWII ended, etc.  Also a first ... the beginnings of awareness and perspective.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I will watch it again tomorrow with my wife, who couldn't watch today.  She'll like the love interest:  it'll keep her watching the rest of the film.  Meanwhile, my grandson is showing some real interest in my model airplanes since watching it this afternoon, yet another first ...

Highly recommended .

You bring up a really great point, Ordie. I think it's important when watching Red Tails to keep in mind Lucas' aesthetic toward old serials - there's a free-wheeling, old-fashioned fun and derring-do to the whole proceeding, just as there is with Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I remember coming out of it thinking it felt like the kind of war movie that doesn't get made anymore - and yes it drops the ball on some finer points of accuracy and draws characters in broad archetypes. It romanticizes the hell out of WWII aerial combat. But does it get across the key message that a group of African American pilots, through their skill and daring, overcame massive obstacles to win respect and even admiration? You bet it does.

I keep meaning to break it out for my four-year-old son to watch - the wife's still a bit "oh noes, it has guns and violence" - but she'll just have to suck it up in this instance.

One thing that galls me about most historical films is how absolutely fast and loose they play with history. Gladiator, for example. While there are parts of the movie that I love, I can't really watch it these days. Aside from the fact that Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, Commodus was an emperor, and gladiators fought in the Colosseum, it gets literally nothing right. It botched the way the legions fought, on the small side, and made a total mess of history with the "restore the Republic" business. In actual history, Commodus' assassination (in his bath by a wrestling partner) broke something loose in the Empire, and within a short time the Praetorian Guard was auctioning off the emperorship to the highest bidder. Inspiring, no?

Through this lens, one of my hands-down favorite historical films is 300. It gets the big and the small things right. It's the only film I've ever seen that more or less accurately captures a Greek phalanx in action. It nails in the broad strokes what went down at Thermopylae. It's not so much inaccurate as it is embellished. To me, it's the story as the Spartans would want it told, with themselves being more bad*** than humanly possible and the enemy being more numerous, more intimidating, and more overwhelming than in reality. 

If I think of Red Tails in the same way as 300, I'm better with it. Though the physics of Lightning's P-51 taking a head-on rain of 30mm shells and not shredding to pieces does bother me and probably always will.

DoogsATX

Though the physics of Lightning's P-51 taking a head-on rain of 30mm shells and not shredding to pieces does bother me and probably always will.

Probably not near as much as the fictional 262 pilot!

DoogsATX

... If I think of Red Tails in the same way as 300, I'm better with it. Though the physics of Lightning's P-51 taking a head-on rain of 30mm shells and not shredding to pieces does bother me and probably always will.

Doogs,

If they had made a good documentary about the Tuskeegee airmen in combat, I would have watched it and appreciated it, along with a relative handful of historians, buffs, modellers, etc.  Hollywood (and probably everyone who has ever embellished fact into legend) is looking for a bigger payoff than that.  The older I get, the more I try to just take stuff for what it is.  Red Tails is way better than a chick flick (no offense to any and all chick-flickers out there ...), and, like I said in my first post above, a story worth the time, and whatever suspension of disbelief that's required (for the duration of the film, anyway).  The point at the movie's heart is valid, as you pointed out, even if the facts are a little, ah - "compressed"?  And CGI just keeps getting better and better ...

Like Nick Cage's character says in Raising Arizona, "There's what's right and there's what's right, and never the twain shall meet."

Ordie