Red Tails.

Lighter, Jonathan E.

The Tuskegee Airmen (dir. Robert Markowitz, 1995) was Hollywood's awardwinning first salute to the fliers of the 332nd Fighter Group, the sole operational unit of African-American combat pilots in World War II; the Army Expansion Act of 1939 had provided for segregated aviation units, but even in wartime the 332nd had to fight racism just to get airborne. That heavily fictionalized but dignified script told, rather stiffly, how African Americans had run up an enviable combat record against the Luftwaffe in the air despite continuous bigotry on the ground. (In a powerful scene, college-grad trainees must give up their railway seats--so that white German POWs may be seated.)

Executive producer George Lucas's more fictionalized Red Tails (dir. Anthony Hemingway, 2012) however, tells a narrower story with less intelligence and regrettably winds up demeaning its subject. Lucas describes his and director Anthony Hemingway's method:

    It's designed to be a film [like one made] during the war.
It's
   very patriotic, very jingoistic, very old-fashioned. Corny.... [It]
   was held up for release from 1942, when it was shot [audience
   laughter], and I've been trying to get it released ever
since.... I
   wanted to make it inspirational for teenaged boys. 

Lucas explains further: "I love P-$is. When I was young, that was the hottest airplane.... Being able ... to actually stand here with the P-5 is ... is like the most exciting thing you can do."

So the film's opening line is "Germans! Let's get 'em!" and that sums up most of it.

While Lucas's larger theme is valor, the larger selling point of Red Tails is an eye-popping display of CGI dogfights on a never-before-seen scale, a twelve-year-old's dream in my day: B-iys, P-40 Warhawks, P-51 Mustangs, Me--109s--and, for climax, the swept-wing Me-262, the deadly jet that in larger numbers might have saved the Luftwaffe. Lucas, Hemingway, and a dedicated CGI team collect them all. Not that the effects consistently serve a greater realism. Teenage boys are known to be inspired by video games more than by Book TV, so every B-17 knocked from the sky in the prologue catches fire, and Lucas and company make sure you can hear the crews screaming as their burning planes sag out of sight: not one plunges from less picturesque causes like shot-away control surfaces, severed cables, or dead pilots. Later we see that it takes just one machinegun burst to tear any German jet apart at the wing root. And here's the piece de resistance: the scar-faced Nazi villain (who snarls "Show them no mercy!" and "Die, foolish African!") evades Lieutenant Joe "Lightning" Little (David Oyelowo) with a flashing, 180-degree hovering turn previously known only from UFO reports. Seeing it once, Lightning quickly learns the same move, flipping back to turn a German plane and pilot into another fireball as the audience goes wild. "It's not Glory" Lucas told an interviewer, "where you have a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fodder": which seems a very perverse misreading of Glory (1989).

Notably for a semi-historical film, writers John Ridley and Aaron McGruder assemble as many war-comic cliches as they can muster. Besides that Nazi, who pops up everywhere like Snoopy's Red Baron, there's the scene where Lightning easily turns a German destroyer into a raging fireball with machine guns alone, laughing "How do you like that, Mr. Hitler!" Johnny Cloud, fighter ace of DC Comics' All-American Men of War in the '60s, had more gravitas under the canopy of his Mustang than do the fliers in Red Tails, who banter and give voluble advice during their own life-or-death dogfights. Too many sequences of Red Tails have that liminal comic-book feel, and the filmmakers' grasp of war and human behavior seems to come chiefly from such sources, plus Lucas's Star Wars.

The cartoon quality extends to tactics and, worse, character. So stupid and undisciplined are pilots of all fighter groups other than the 332nd that Nazi "decoy squadrons" can lure them all far, far away, leaving the bombers sitting ducks for Scarface. And, seriously, it works every time, which is one of the movie's plot points: "That's how they were trained," explains the serious and competent Col. Bullard (Terrence Howard). "Here's how we change up that strategy." Though pilots Lightning and Easy (Nate Parker) eventually sort out as the main characters, they're hardly more individualized than anyone else, and do nothing much of human or dramatic interest because you can't fake that with CGI. Lightning falls for an Italian girl he's spotted as beautiful while he flies five hundred feet over her head at 300 m.p.h. They become engaged, so you can guess what happens to him on the big mission to Berlin. "Deacon" (Marcus T. Paulk) on the other hand, leads the men of his flight in Christian prayer and then narrowly survives a fiery explosion.

The human drama of Red Tails lies principally in Bullard's campaign to get the planes and aggressive missions that will allow his tough, competent fliers to prove themselves. But that takes a back seat to the celebration of comradeship and of joy in destruction, of dying-buddy pathos and high-explosive thrills. Red Tails isn't "old-fashioned": it's a postmodern mash-up of moral earnestness, sophomoric imagination, and deliberate camp--uniquely so, except for the scarily profitable Pearl Harbor (2001). Old-time air force movies, in sharp contrast, strove to overcome, or at least neutralize, the kitschy demands of mass, profit-reaping entertainment. Thus we got, in movies teenagers flocked to, the romantic realism of Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), the informative drama of Command Decision (1948) and Twelve O'Clock High (1949), the edgy psychology of The War Lover (1962), the grounded defiance of The Great Escape (1963), and the historically responsible spectacle of The Battle of Britain (1969). Red Tails (whose martial imagery is among the most seductive since The Song of Roland) sadly lacks most of these qualities. As inspirational dramas of African Americans at war, Glory and The Tuskegee Airmen still stand alone.