Stealth

Stealth is the new film from Rob Cohen, the guy who brought us The Fast & the Furious and xXx, and let me say from the outset, if you know any thirteen year old boys, they’ve going to think that this is the best film ever made.
It’s set among an elite Navy fighter plane squadron – so elite in fact that there are only three of them, Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel (Question number 1: what on earth was Jamie Foxx thinking when he accepted this part). They’re quickly assigned to an aircraft carrier where their futuristic (read CGI) planes do lots of stunts. So far, so Top Gun, but that’s not actually where the film’s heading. There’s a fourth member of the team. Yes it’s a computer-controlled plane! Think KITT from Knight Rider and you’re there. It does speak, and for a second I thought that they might even have some glowing LEDs. Instead we get a kind of CPU with a red “eye” that observes all around it, and for which there’s probably a good case of breach of copyright from HAL in 2001. It’s just a shame that they didn’t get William Daniels to voice the plane (it does speak in a sub-HAL manner).
Their first mission takes them to “Myanmar” – that’s Burma to the rest of the world – where a terrorist meeting’s taking place. Fortunately CIA operatives have told them it’s happening in 24 minutes on the top level of a building in downtown Rangoon.
The planes head off at hypersonic speed and reach Rangoon in minutes (it quickly becomes apparent that being based on an aircraft carrier is pretty pointless since their fighters can reach all corners of the planet pretty easily – in this case travelling from somewhere around the Phillipines to Burma in no time).
But there’s a problem! It quickly becomes obvious from Biel’s character running various computer simulations in her cockpit (this lot can multi-task like no others), that if the use their current weapons, they’ll kill thousands of innocent Burmese in the busy surrounding areas. We get a few brief cutaways showing the dastardly terrorists arriving, closing off the busy streets surrounding this international terrorist summit meeting. It seems that the mission can’t be accomplished until “KITT” works out if you come from above you can do it. The pilots don’t trust the plane, so Lucas decides to take on the manouevre himself even if there is a “73% chance of blackout”.
Needless to say, the building is destroyed and nary another soul, aside from the evil terrorists, is hurt. You might have thought that discrete surveillance might have revealed more information about the bad guys, but it doesn’t make good films.
On the way back to their aircraft carrier – and yes, it does seem like the US Navy actually assisted in the making of this film – the “KITT” plane gets hit by lightning and its highly advanced circuits get frazzled. Now if there’s one thing we all know about computers, it’s that if they get hit by lightning, they don’t just break like our home electronics does. Instead their “neural networks” get all mixed up and confused and they become vaguely evil and irresponsible.
So you can imagine the problems when the guy running the computer plane scheme forces them to take “KITT” with them on the next mission. He detonates a series of missiles in Tajikistan, and although concern (again from Biel who’s the humane member of the team) is expressed about the radioactive cloud that will kill thousands of farmers nearby before heading on to a populous part of Pakistan, that’s about the last we hear of this tragedy.
I won’t give away any more of the plot, but it’s fast moving, people die, someone ends up in North Korea on the run, we get a Sky News flash (from a Columbia film), we visit Alaska, we see a refuelling dirigible (one guess what happens to that), and innocent Russian planes are shot down without a care in the world. It doesn’t bear thinking about the kind of diplomatic mess the US would be in by the end of this film.
Needless to say it’s heavily CGI’d, sometimes well done, other times really badly done. There seem to be a few minitures used too, although obviously if I’m noticing that there are minitures, then that’s a bad thing. All the camera work in the sky has that shaky look that they’ve used recently on the new series of Battlestar Galactica to give it veracity. The acting is perfunctary at best, and the whole thing comes across as one of those straight to video Top Gun knockoffs that tended to be filmed with the Israeli air force back in the eighties, except that they’ve removed the need for real planes and done the whole thing with computers.
You know that it’s a PG-13 in the States because there’s precisely one “fuck” carefully placed in the latter part of the film, and unlike, say Owen Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines, US Navy pilots (well female ones anyway) seem to get to run around in cropped T-shirts and tight fitting “pants”. Incidentally, my top survival tip for when you get shot down in North Korea and feel the need to drink some water desperately is to go upstream of the local village you stumble across rather than run the risk of being spotted by kids playing in the river.
Leave your brain at home if you really feel the need to go and see this film.