Legends of Flight

I originally got to see this in its IMAX glory at the Tuttleman IMAX Theater at the Ben Franklin Institute. The film was a perfect fit for that theater and while not having an intriguing story line, it was inspirational.

The story of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner has opened the world of airplane engineering and risks. My favorite part is when it describes the future of air travel as only just beginning.

I was excitedly surprised to see this movie about to start on PBS on a Saturday night. I settled in to watch a film about "Legends of Flight", but then had to force myself to remain watching until the finish.

In addition to there being little film but plenty of computer generated animation, the movie seemed to be hardly about aircraft at all. Repeatedly, there were more images of cartoon birds and bees and animated nuts and bolts than images of aircraft, either real or computer generated.

From the title, I assumed I was going to view a great film about aircraft and powered flight, but instead found this movie supremely disappointing. If you're a CGI fan, you might have a look. If you're an airplane buff, don't be fooled by the title. Pass this one by.

While Shaw's Lido is getting all the attention for its IMAX hall, one shouldn't forget another similar evolution happening to the West of our island where the Science Centre is, with its Omnimax theatre also retrofitted with a new seamless dome, meaning no more lines in between segments of the screen as experienced previously, and the result is simply great.

The title Legends of Flight is a little peculiar, given the use of the word Legends you'll probably under the impression that this has got something to do with the history of flight, and the milestones achieved through various recognizable aircrafts which leave their stamp of quality in air travel. Unfortunately that is not the case, and as this turned out it would be more appropriately named Boeing's Dreamliner 787, because essentially this is just about that, from conception of the idea right down to manufacture and test flights made, no doubt on the big screen which brings forth the sheer scale of such a project, and of the aircraft itself.

At least one got to peek inside Boeing's manufacturing facility, which is one of the largest building structures in the world having to roll off wide bodied aircraft from an assembly line, but as a trade off we have got to sit through some very strange recreation of board room drama where designers and engineers get to pretend once again what happened during the early years of their dreaming of a new, larger, and more efficient plane. It's also quite something to see how man's inspiration for flight, the bird, got to be studied a little more thoroughly to understand the mechanics of flight, and to adopt what little knowledge is gleaned to be incorporated into the design, as much as the Dreamliner goes.

To exploit the IMAX presentation, we get to at least see an airshow, as well as the flight of the Airbus A380, the largest commercial liner currently in operation. There's also the Harrier fighter jet that got showcased, but as mentioned, for its title, the number of aircraft on display was surprisingly woeful, if not for the technical details and behind the scenes look at the 787 conception. Some snazzy graphics and visual effects were utilized to spruce up the thin narrative that also had a side track to examine various propulsion units in striped down detail, but I have expected more from the film.

I'm an aviation nut, a real airplane aficionado, and a student pilot. So, naturally, I'm looking forward to this IMAX film with great expectations. And, because of my addiction to airplanes and anything airplane related, probably had a higher level of expectation than normal. I'm an IMAX card holder so I watched this at a pre-screening event and didn't pay anything to see it. And going into the movie, I really wanted to like this film, because it's about airplanes, it's IMAX, it's Canadian. Unfortunately, it really failed to deliver on anything except two or three great scenes involving the 787 Dreamliner and a Harrier Jet. The rest of the film involved some mildly interesting shots of the Boeing manufacturing facility, but that was it.

By far my biggest complaint about this film is that Stephen Low relied far, far, far too heavily on computer-generated birds and airplanes. Why do some directors insist on replacing perfectly good objects in real life (birds, airplanes) with computer graphics? One scene involved a bi-plane that actually looked real . . . until the thing did a barrel roll in a most unnatural way. You have to see it to know what I mean. Why? Why do this? Why make entire scenes look like something out of Flight Simulator X? And why keep using CAD-style birds and bees? Not to mention one painful scene involving a "fly-through" of a computer rendering that looks like Tron on acid.

IMAX directors also have to get rid of the cheese factor. For example, why does Low set up the people in the film to "act"? He films them supposedly working away in one scene in a boardroom discussing something, but you can tell from their dialogue that they're acting. And really poorly acting. If this is a documentary type film, which it is, why have goofy acting segments? Another example of cheese: trying to work in (computer generated) fighter jets flying 20 feet from a Canadian warship. Not gonna happen!

Finally, the film is entitled "Legends of Flight" but I can't figure out what the "legend" is. What legend? Low could've started with the legend of Icarus and the dreams of Da Vinci, but he doesn't. The entire "legend" is the manufacture of one airplane. The story is barely coherent with unrelated scenes jammed together. All in all, a wasted opportunity. The only 10% of this film that I enjoyed was the widescreen shots of the A380 and the 787.

I never saw this, so I would be voting "neutral" (5), regretting if unable to opt out.

However the "cartoon" reference was telling about directors who sacrifice the real thing for CGI. The whole dependency on CGI is utterly stupid, and it ruined what could have been a stellar "The Aviator" (2004), IMHO. That film took a real live airworthy Lockheed 1049G Constellation, in perfect flying order, flown all the way from Kansas City to Burbank, only to be replicated as the budding TWA. No flying scenes with the rare living airplane at all...NONE. I was pretty shocked despite DiCaprio's stellar acting ability, as well as the other players. A TERRIBLE loss indeed.