Monday, June 19, 2006
Turning Your Brain On At The Movies - Part 1
Directed by Rob Cohen
Written by W.D. Richter
(2005)
What the film thinks it is about: Three ace fighterpilots pilot three ace fighters in a top secret military development programme. In a shocking twist it turns out that it wasn't the fighters that were being developed but a special AI pilot that will eventually render the three ace fighterpilots obsolete. In a shocking twist the AI plane is then hit by lightning which scrambles its brains and turns it evil, leading to much death. In a shocking twist, the commanding officer tries to kill the three ace fighterpilots so there's no proof that his fancy pants AI malfunctioned. In a shocking twist, it turns out the AI wasn't really evil, just trying to deal with his new, lightning-created free-thinking and his old military programming. AI and hunky man pilot team up to save the hot woman pilot and peace is restored by blowing up most of Korea. The black pilot died an hour ago.
What it is really about: The joy of these big summer movies is that they concentrate only on the surface level, and Stealth is an undeniably whizzy film, only to leave all the juicy underneath stuff - the subtext, the theme, the meaning - up to chance. Which means that they are up for grabs for people smart enough to know Stealth is a shit film, but immature enough to still want to see it (this would be us).
Stealth is, in fact, an anti-military satire every bit as scathing as entirely awesome bugs'n'fascists epic Starship Troopers.
The best example of this, and possibly the funniest moment in film last year, comes when the team goes on its first mission with the AI pilot - to blow up a building in downtown Asian Country where military intelligence has pinpointed the location of a meeting with several terrorist leaders who are planning an immediate strike on America. It's probably best to put scare-quotes around every verb and noun in the last part of that sentence. The building is surrounded by densely packed faceless asian civilians and the solution is to drop an 'implosion' bomb into the basement. Stealth then shows the bomb hitting with pinpoint accuracy and the building, in one beautiful shot, collapsing in on itself so neatly that the facelss asian civilians barely even get any dust on them.
Anyone with their brains turned on will note that military intelligence, shown here to be so omnipotent as to be able to read the bad guys' lips from orbit, is never so accurate and that blowing up buildings in heavily populated areas doesn't look like deflating a balloon. The film, in showing so hyperbolically how perfect the American war on terror is, actually draws direct attention to what a fantasy this scenario is.
Also interesting is that the hunky pilot actually breaks orders in order to deliver the bomb, as the manouevre was considered too risky for the plane to undertake. He performs the manouevre, only barely avoiding crashing his fighter into an apartment block, and goes back home to triumphant music. This seems to be telling us that American heroes are free-thinkers, able to think beyond orders in order to achieve their heroic Greater Good.
Anyone with their brains turned on will see these pilots as completely indoctrinated, group-think robots, programmed to believe what their superiors tell them to believe. Hunky pilot talks of not wanting to turn war into a computer game, yet we are informed of the success of the mission by a computer read-out telling us 'Collateral: 0', and may as well have read 'Level Complete'. They talk of war having to be dangerous for the fighters or the responsibility of war is lost, yet there they are, like winged titans, dropping death from miles above onto hundreds of faceless foreign bad people 15 minutes later. They talk of calling off an attack on those bad darkies because there's a chance a nuclear cloud will destroy an inhabited valley, yet when one of their team (the AI plane which, for the slow, doesn't have any people in it) does attack, they immeditaley join in because you can't leave your buddy alone, even if they are committing war crimes. The valley does get covered in a nuclear cloud, and precious litle is heard from it for the rest of the film.
There's plenty more (like their shore-leave tactic of fucking anything that moves and then promptly fucking off, or like the black pilot walking through a rice paddy not actually in Vietnam, but whatever, saying how beautiful it was with the child-like wonder of someone who had genuinely not considered this before), but I'll try and wrap it up.
Stealth is a fantasy for eight year old boys and the text, including the pro-military propoganda, only works if you are eight. The subtext is that if you are older than eight, you will see the bullshit for what it is. The best example of this is, when the planes are zipping merrily across international borders, the film shows the world from orbit to show the route the planes are taking and actually overlays a map onto the world, complete with nice big lettering for the hard of thinking. To accept this shit, the film is telling us, you have to be spectacularly stupid.
Now the film is awful, and I shouldn't try and convince you to watch it. The plane sequences are very nifty for anyone who was an eight year old boy once, but the soundtrack is filled with really sucky rock that still doesn't drown out the mostly leaden dialogue, the special effects can't save the wooden acting, and I don't think Rob 'Down Wit Da Kidz' Cohen actually meant for any of the satire. But, if you are willing to turn your brain on during films that should only be watched by the lobotomised, I highly recommend the Piece-of-Shit Stealth.
I'll have the next installment up the next time I watch another stupid summer spectacle movie which, tragically, won't be very long.
Read or Post a Comment
<< Home