Stealth (2005)

The script for this movie was clearly written by somebody with very little idea. Its simple but mildly amusing however it could have benefited by somebody actually talking to somebody who knows something about naval aviation. Landing aircraft and launching aircraft at the same time is not going to happen and that was one of the more obvious problems.Flying from Alaska to North Korea where the flight starts at night, crosses the coast in full daylight yet by the time the aircraft covers the short distance to the DMZ, its suddenly full night.The explosions are fun and that perhaps is the best that can be said for this B grade sci-fi / action action movie. It just needed sharks with lasers to cap it off

I don't know why they call this movie "Stealth." There are a lot of stealthy looking Naval aircraft in it but stealth counts for nothing. There's no action in being stealthy. And this has nothing but action. When the pilots are on foot and not exchanging machine gun fire with enemy troops on the ground, the airplanes are whipping around through the sky, doing maneuvers at Mach 1 that would generate G forces that would squash any ordinary human being into something resembling the world's biggest pizza pie.Oh -- and another thing. Why do they call these guys on giant modern aircraft carriers "sailors"? They're not sailors. They're city dwellers living in a gigantic apartment complex with an ocean view. I was a sailor on a Coast Guard cutter the size of a destroyer, and a sailor is somebody who gets waked up in the middle of the night by some boatswain's mate with a cup of coffee in his hand and is ordered to mop up the sea water that's been shipped into the crew's quarters.I'm glad I was finally able to get that off my chest. Yes. I feel much better now, Doctor.Let me see about the plot. It rips off so many other films that I lost track. A fully computerized fighter bomber goes berserk like an airborne HAL2000 series and begins to disobey orders until at the end it sacrifices itself to save two American pilots. The pilots and the flying junkyard and their joint boss, Sam Shepherd, are real beauties too. We're not at war with anybody, yet -- let me thing -- we blast hell out of a ten-story building in Rangoon where some terrorists are supposed to be hiding. We then obliterate a scud missile base in Cloud Cuckoostan, sending a roiling billow of radioactive dust over a nearby village full of innocent but swarthy people. We violate Russian air space and shoot down a couple of their interceptors. We violate North Korean air space and obliterate the troops that pursue our downed pilot. Our losses: one pilot, by accident, sort of. I don't think I left anybody out.The award for best performance in a junky movie goes to -- envelope, please -- YES, HAL2000 Series C! Here name "EDI", Hal has a somewhat soothing voice, the kind that might come from a late-night classical music program on FM radio, but it's kind of feminine too. And, unlike HAL, it can make wisecracks and argue with its controllers. It even makes a little joke before it commits altruistic suicide. "Good-bye," says HAL casually before ramming a North Korean helicopter.When "Something Wicked This Way Comes" was released, critics were disappointed. They'd been promised a glimpse of these new things called computer-generated images, and all they got was a few seconds of some digitalized choo-choo. Those CGIs were embedded in a human story. Now it's the other way around,.

If the reported $135k budget was accurate, this action film squeezed out great production values (some great explosions!), plus Jessica Biel to boot. Alas, they should've hired a better writer. Plot is as unfulfilling as can be expected when the main bad guy is AI gone rogue. For example, what of the minor villains? I never figured out their motives or ultimate goals, but it's too painful to re-watch. Now, there's a couple of possible satisfying conclusions: fixing the AI at the last moment before it destroys something; or battling it in a big climactic battle; or turning it back into an ally against an even more dangerous foe. Unfortunately, none of the above occurred. In the end, the AI wasn't intelligent at all - it should've at least been able to detect if there were friends or foes in the vicinity (a basic capability for even non-AI) then act strategically. Yes, I'm calling a self-aware jet stupid for not using built-in radar. Similarly, I'm calling out the writer for not catching that major goof, which made the final showdown, in a word, unnecessary. These aren't spoilers, as you still can't guess what happened or how the climax would've been affected, aside from a battle that shouldn't have ended that way, maybe shouldn't even have happened. Will the knowledge of a screwed up ending keep anyone from watching? I don't intend to stop anyone; for what's it worth, up to that point I was passing Stealth with a 7/10. This is like the lack of anger/outrage in Neo's message in the final scene made me drop Matrix from an overall all-time great 10 rating to an 8.

An interesting way to see this box office failure is to consider the role of the US Navy rather than that of Hollywood. The film industry makes these sort of stupid and expensive mistakes routinely. The military has less room for tolerance, and when it goofs like this, it really costs.The film supposedly cost $130M to make, but that was just the Hollywood bill. When the Navy gets behind a film as it did here, it commits billions (many billions) in hardware and thousands of people. The rationale is that when these things work, they help recruiting. Beyond the obvious, there is some serious thought given to how national narratives can be woven to incite pride in providing military service, and how a suitably crafted professional armed forces supports domestic democracy.The way this works is that beyond making assets available, the Navy provides script guidance (the thing has to support the goals) and technical advice. Both fail so miserably here that it gives us lessons about the W Bush management of narrative. (This is quite apart from any qualms about glorifying military action.)The script has issues in this regard. Today, it is entirely believable that you'll find attractive, kickass women competently flying front-line aircraft. But it is so demeaning to everyone in the military to cast her as the damsel in distress that is only rescued because she has a lover in command. This is such a profound issue and it bears so centrally on the nature of the service that I am amazed at it. I can only believe that Bush SES appointees believed that this was on point with the Boss's notion. I've seen how this works.More interesting to filmgoers will be the extrapolation of hardware. W Bush military doctrine was to push for advanced weapon platforms already in the pipeline. Practically, that meant pushing through aircraft designed 15 years previously. As it happens, the management systems you use to design these things change 4 to five times more slowly than technology does, so you are always making planes for the wrong mission using several generations older technology. There were ways around this, but not ones that interested the Bush Whitehouse.So the mission of the Navy advisors was to 1) push for the need for next generation F/A aircraft 2) indicate the role for UCAV, one that is very carefully defined to complement manned aircraft. At the time of this film, the extent to which thrust vectoring had been mastered was still classified, public stealth techniques still required strange shapes. Pulsed detonation engine research is still hidden, and in 2004, Quantum Interaction computing techniques were just being considered. (This is different than quantum hardware.)Capable combat drones were suppressed in the Bush era (to help fund the large programs), and remotely piloted drones are a far cry from autonomous swarming vehicles, but there was a shortlived serious effort in the latter.So they could have done a fantastic job on describing a future that teen hardware geeks could have really dug into, both on the manned and unmanned side. They could have placed something really sexy in the center of the film and made it work as a film and as an attractive vision. But they were just... too... stupid. And Rob Cohen matched them.Sam Shepard plays Lear.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.