According to his interview on the Letterman show, he signed and filmed Stealth before Ray. Apparently, the studio had shelved it as a number of people felt that it didn’t live up to expectations…although what those expectations were, I cannot tell. I’m sure someone, after Ray made it big, felt it was worth using Foxx’s star power as a vehicle to get back some of their money.
D.A.R.Y.L. wasn’t evil, and he was supposed to be a weapon, I think.
so, batman begins was only playing 8 hours after i got to the theater, and my brother would be visiting me and the parents by then, so that was out. stealth was the number two choice from the what should i watch poll.
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i mostly enjoyed it in that it had pretty explosions and jessica biel in a bikini flipping a double bird.
how bad was it? in the end, i was almost rooting for the north koreans.
i’m not sure how navy pilots are trained in escape and evasion, but “head towards the north korean tents with pond because you’re thirsty, then leave your flight jacket there” doesn’t seem a likely lesson to learn.
i was actually feeling sorry for the north korean platoon that got wiped out doing their jobs just because the corrupt american commander was an idiot. i mean sure north korea is part of the axis of terror, but those guys were hunting down a pilot who apparently illegally invaded their airspace. by the way, biel is tough in this movie: her chute burns up(actually a decent scene), she drops through about 100 feet of branches, she gets shot in the arm, and she keeps going. hell, when they sent a dog after her, she just stayed and got a rock to defend herself with.
and can someone tell me how you go from russian-breakaway-republic-ikastan (on the border with pakistan) and then wind up in north korea?
and i was suckered. i thought the movie would have most of it being the ai vs the pilots, but instead we get the lead white guy defying orders to get the ai back and tells jamie foxx to shoot it down. he fails and winds up crashing into a cliff in a ridiculous slow-mo crash scene. it didn’t even look like it was that hard to avoid given how fast he was successfully flying before. then after that the lead pilot doesn’t try to kill the ai anymore. “i’ve seen this movie before. the black guy always gets it first.”
the ai tries to kill the lead pilot once by doing the burning fuel in a ring thing you see in the trailer. but he does it by igniting the fuel at the farthest possible palce giving the lead plenty of time to escape just in the nick of time. the ai later saves him for no apparent reason during a fight with russian fighters.
and that fuel in a circle thing? that comes from this dirigible carrying fuel tanks that flies in circles that us planes apparently use. a freaking slow giant blimp with tons of fuel. that’s an awesome way to dispence fuel to warplanes. i actually admired the plot for mentioning how it would run out of fuel eventually and then they came up with a refueling dirigible to explain it. a dirigible!
the ring of fuel came from the ai being denied fuel from the blimp, then the ai shoots the nozzle off.
they also seemed to totally ignore the fact that after this movie the us would pretty much be at war with at least 2 countries, or at least have to deliver a really really big gift basket saying “sorry.”
i refuse to go into the shore leave scenes because they are just that bad. well, i will mention how jamie foxx tried to defend the ai as saying it was technology that would help them, protect them, etc. that matches up with the irony of biel, whose main job seems to be estimating collateral damage casualties, was discovered by a ten year old north korean girl who she did not immediately knock out and then run away from, instead trying to use smiles and “shhhhhh.”
i could go into the inconsistencies of having the commander try to have the lead pilot killed by intel spooks after their conversations where he implies how this technology will mean he won’t have to face grieving mothers.
hell, in the end we’re denied the satisfaction of a competent “military guy is about to be arrested, so he shoots himself” because they have it all set up with the commander grabbing his pistol and then the gunshot sound is actually merged with the sound of a mortar flare going off. and no blood spray. C’MON!
there were a few cool scenes where they blow up enemy sams and forts and buildings up. the chute scene was pretty suspenseful(it probably helps i have no idea if it was realistic to have all the flaming debris raining down 2000 feet away from the explosion of the plane).
also, one last complaint: as the lead and biel limp off south towards the south korean border i can’t help but wonder if they know that it’s the most heavily mined area in the entire world. i guess they do because they wind up on the carrier in the end.
i asked before how a plane piloted by an ai hit by lightning and becoming sentient could go wrong? when it joins forces with the lead and helps rescue the female pilot because it overheard a single conversation between the lead and the carrier’s captain.
Hmm… I wonder if anyone will ever make a movie off Keith Laumer’s Bolo books? Now that was some real asskicking A.I., mixed with a good dose of humanizing heroism.
Second thought, some shitty filmmaker would screw it all up, so it’s probably best that no one ever makes it.
Me neither, Bill. You usually exhibit good taste. What a godawful wreck that thing was.
But disturbance for the sake of disturbance? Maybe that’s not what you mean to say, but I think Kubrick was after a lot more than just fucking with people’s heads. Disturbing an audience is not hard to do; it seems to me that Kubrick was leveraging unease toward very particular ends.
I liked Eyes Wide Shut too, but I interpreted its theme and meaning in an entirely different way. Interesting to hear your take on it.
The US uses blimps for radar platforms mostly, and ASW work occasionally. How the hell you would use them for airborne refueling is beyond me.
Well I guess it would be possible, if not highly dangerous for a variety of reasons.
— Alan
Me neither, Bill. You usually exhibit good taste. What a godawful wreck that thing was.[/quote]
Hey, I freely admit it. I dunno. Kubrick’s my favorite director, and I’m thinking I watch the film going Oh, that stupid part is Spielberg’s, I bet, even though I’m evidently wrong vis a vis the ending. But, you know, I walked out of the theater liking it, but I’ve only seen it once in full since. I guess I’m just a mindless fanboy, admiring the scenery and touches I’ve always liked from Stanley, meanwhile it’s stupid, trite, bungled and botched.
Yes, which was why I used the word “uncomfortable” instead of “disturbing.” Otherwise, I totally agree with you, and I guess I wasn’t being clear. The connecting theme may have been uncomfortability, but it was indeed simply a device to draw the viewer in. The major theme varied from film to film but you know, it was never all that pleasant. War, insanity, infidelity, the boundaries of humanity and the human condition. Pretty heady stuff.
Well fuck, Mister. I ain’t shipping out anytime soon. I’ve heard absolutely nobody’s take on it thus far, I’d love to hear yours.
I’ll fess up to getting dragged to this last week with a buddy who’s a sucker for crap movies.
Yep, it’s horrible.
Would’ve been a decent scene if it was, oh, fifteen or twenty seconds. As it was, it was several minutes of “oh shit my plane’s broken ok I’m flying back to the carrier oh no it’s REALLY broken I’m preparing to eject I’m ejecting I’ve ejected oh shit my plane’s coming at me oh shit it blew up oh shit it’s raining debris down on me gosh that’s a lot of debris ouch the debris bounced off me I can’t deploy my chute 'cause the debris will burn it up I’m reconfiguring my chute deploy computer gizmo my chute deployed boy there’s a lot of debris oh surprise the debris hit my parachute oh shit my parachute is burning oh shit my parachute is broken oh shit I fell in some trees oof oof ouch ouch bounce whew I came to a stop dangling by my harness three feet above the ground I’m hitting my harness release thud I passed out”, with airplane debris falling like a Bay/Bruckheimer meteor shower all around the entire time. Except when she got near the trees, and all the debris magically disappeared.
… or Alaska, for that matter?
Haha, I loved the refueling thingy – it looked like some leftover prop from Waterworld, turning slow circles in the sky.
There are so many ways to complete this sentence, I almost passed out just now.
Unfortunately, while Stealth is bad, it’s not bad enough to be good – it’s just plain shitty. In order to reach the exalted circle of craptasticacity wherein lies, say, Road House or Battlefield Earth, it needs some help:
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More gratuitous slo-mo shots. There were only a couple, and they weren’t anywhere near preposterous enough.
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An actor less vanilla than Josh Lucas, but preferably not a good one. Someone like, oh, a young Patrick Swayze.
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Nudity. There was not a single gratuitous boob shot in the entire film.
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more dialogue from the AI, definitely. And about the AI. “It downloads music from the internet.” “Which music?” “All of it.” That’s GOLD – we need more!
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More stupid, idiot technobabble – trying to sound smart talking about quantum circuits was a good start, describing the AI’s processing power as “a terabit per second” was even better, but then you quit. So much potential wasted.
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After the UCAV flies itself into the piddly little NK chopper at the end of the movie, the Hero should salute the flaming wreck, and say “that was the best damn wingman I ever had.”
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The Thai girl Jamie Foxx picks up on leave should actually be perfectly fluent in English, because she’s actually an agent for the Bad Guys, out to steal The Plans or something.
8 ) Jessica Biel should’ve been captured and chained to a wall Barbarian-Queen-style by the North Koreans, who would discover her wearing her bikini underneath her uniform. They would of course leave just enough uniform intact to cover the bits that would otherwise require expensive contract addendums.
- Jeff Goldblum should’ve done something with a computer virus in there somewhere. Ha ha, just kidding, that’s cliche.
etc etc etc.
How do the blimps go fast enough to keep the jets from falling out of the sky when they try to match speed with the refueling platform?
So they design and spend billions on the ultimate AI weapon but don’t shield it from lightning.
Explain to me how you shield ANYTHING from lightning?
A typicaly lightning bolt is what 1,000,000,000 volts +?
Didn’t War of the Worlds teach us that lightning has EMP qualities, so, technically the damn plane just shoulda crashed and burned.
also, one last complaint: as the lead and biel limp off south towards the south korean border i can’t help but wonder if they know that it’s the most heavily mined area in the entire world
In theory the bombs or missiles that caused the rather large explosions when the EDI showed up would have detnonated the mines.
Or, at any rate, the ground would have been mined, but roads usually aren’t.
jessica biel in a bikini
Pretty much the only reason I saw the movie, and what you saw of that scene in the commercial was about all there was in the movie.(way too short)
Actually, commercial passenger airliners get hit by lightning more than you’d think.
Case in point: http://cellar.org/2005/lightningstrike1.gif
BOOM! Hehehe. Actual statistic is like 1 in 1000 hours or something like that. Hasn’t been a lightning related crash in 40 years though. When you’re not grounded, lightning doesn’t screw with you much other than being bright and scary.
Wow!
Ben: Uhhhhhh
Luke: Ben what is it?
Ben: I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if…
Luke: As if what?
Ben: As if 300 people crapped their pants all at once.
Heh, but seriously, you’d think that being that close to that much high voltage would screw up sensitive electronics.
But I guess that stuff would be insulated from the outer skin of the aircraft.Though if that bolt had hit near the pilots it could have blinded them.
On top of that, lightning tends to carry aliens. There should have been an alien inside Stealth, seriously pissed off because the flightplan went wrong and he missed his destination tripod entirely.