Red Tails

My biggest problem is that I saw the 1995 film Tuskegee Airman and loved it. I had to compare this current film to that and unfortunately found it extremely lacking.

I don't feel any connection to the characters in this film. Live or die, who knows or cares.

Contrasting that with the Tuskegee Airman, when people died in that film, you felt it. You cared about each single character and were emotionally invested with them.

So my saying, wait for DVD, and if you want a much better film, buy the Tuskegee Airman. You wont be disappointed.

This film opens with a CGI aerial battle that is literally of the quality I would expect from a direct-to-DVD film by a company like The Asylum. It's shockingly embarrassing for a theatrical release with a $58 million budget. Even the font used in the titles smells like a no budget film. It does get better than this, but not as much as it should. Explosions are all CGI and don't look like they exist in the same plane as the physical objects. Oddly, every German pilot in this film appears to be exactly the same person. Effects aside, this film is intended to play more like a 1950's era war movie than a modern one. That's a valid choice, but it doesn't play like a good one. The story is, on the face of it, an interesting one, but the narrative strokes are so unbelievably broad that the film really doesn't progress after the basic plot setup is done. Some of the actors do a pretty fine job given the one dimensionality of their characters (David Oyelowo is particularly good), but they have precious little to work with.

Red Tails is a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. A squadron of black Army pilots who served with distinction in Europe in World War II despite facing racial prejudice.

The film was produced by George Lucas and it has some top notch CGI with the aerial battle scenes. The script is rather corny and flat as well as being fictionalised.

The four main characters are Marty 'Easy' Julian (Nate Parker) who likes to drink a lot. His best friend, Joe 'Lightning' Little (David Oyelowo) a hotshot pilot who is having a romance with a local Italian woman. Samuel 'Joker' George (Elijah Kelley) is good for laughs. Ray 'Junior' Gannon (Tristan Wilds) is the baby of the group.

The film is too uninspired, cheesy and cliched. It manages to get glorified cameos from Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr.

It's 1944 Italy. The Tuskegee Airmen are a squadron of black pilots finally given the chance to prove themselves in the sky, even while they're battling discrimination on the ground. The are given the task of protecting bombers sent to destroy Germany.

This stars a large cast of black actors most notably Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The story of these men is a whole lot of cheesy stale clichés. The filmmaker seemed to have concentrated on CG fighter action more than giving these men good story lines. This multi-story line is embarrassingly old school. If they could just do one character, that would be an improvement. And imagine if that character is real.

Among the many problems I had with Red Tails, I suppose one of the most egregious was the incredibly overbearing and cloying musical score. But in a rather sad way, the score perfectly fits the entirely forced and artificial nature of the movie itself. Now, I know that typically a film's musical score is used to enhance emotion, but in the case of Red Tails, the music is so over-the-top, in-your-face, and cliché ridden that I couldn't help but laugh at times. One example is the music we hear when a soldier drives into an Italian town. Yes, we know we're in Italy, but in case anyone is confused we're treated to a musical cue that sounds like the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. And if you can't figure out that the German pilot is a bad guy, why, the music will certainly tell you! Well, that and the GIGANTIC SCAR ON HIS German FACE!

And I'm sure I'll be called a pinko/commie for saying this, but what was up with playing America the Beautiful during the credits? It felt so forced, like the music in one of those "patriotic" animatronic exhibits at Disneyland that gets mocked. And the reason those are mocked is because they are lifeless objects trying to manipulate and force us to feel something without actually LETTING us feel that way on our own. It's cynical trickery. And that's how I feel about the score of Red Tails and pretty much the movie in general.

The men of the 332nd were heroes and patriots. Real ones. But they were also real men, not the cartoon characters in Red Tails. And the Tuskegee Airmen deserve better than the childish fantasy of George Lucas by way of Anthony Hemingway.