In the publicity for this movie, the filmmakers take great pride in the reconstruction of war planes from the 1960s. And they've chosen to start the movie off by showing fighter planes in action. There's a mistake that artists make -- assuming that where they invested the most effort is where the audience will feel the most appreciation. We (by which of course I mean I) don't care much about those airborne toys until the ground-level plot has got underway and we understand that there are identifiable human beings involved.
As the movie progresses, pilots are introduced as characters so that by the next time around we care more about what happens to those planes. Another reason we care is that there's a war to be fought and it's very important that our country win. In that way, this movie contrasts with a long line of famous Israeli movies, such as Waltz with Bashir, Foxtrot, and Lebanon, that portray soldiers as pawns of little meaning in a senseless, unnecessary conflict. As if addressing the peaceniks of the world, one of the characters adds an important word to a common saying: "Peace is made with defeated enemies," he remarks.
Coincidentally or not, by taking us back to a decade when the country wholeheartedly supported the war effort, the movie takes us back to a time when female soldiers were supposed to be seen and not heard. The movie pointedly shows that their voices are ignored, an observation that seems prophetic considering that the script comes from a year or two before the female lookouts warned in vain of the coming October 7 attack on Israel.
This movie has been called Israel's "Top Gun," and although I haven't seen the non-Israeli one, I read a summary and I can see similarities. This movie focuses on two pilots, one of whom needs to learn to assert himself a little more whereas the other needs to learn to take other people into consideration. It's good that the scriptwriters realized you can't base a movie entirely on planes zooming past one another.
