Stealth

I suppose that A Movie About The Morality of Warfare and The Implications of Advanced Technology would have been too long for the posters. That’s a shame, really, because underneath all of the special effects and the glibness of the “elite pilots have feelings too” method acting that’s what Stealth is really trying to be.

Dropping us in the late stages of a high-tech fighter test program Stealth begins on a very bad note: pre-title on-screen backstory (OK for Star Wars which is aping the serialized shorts of the 1950s, not so good for a movie that wants to be a thinking viewer’s Top Gun). Our pilots, Lt. Ben ‘Bic’ Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and Lt. Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx), are the “Navy Air Corps” best and brightest having scrambled and fought and proved their way into this experimental program. Anyone who has ever seen an action movie that includes a female character knows that Ben, the lead pilot, is in love with his fellow flyer Kara, and if you don’t know it as a given up-front the charming way he defers and lets her have the lone grape popcicle after their last stage 1 sortie should be enough of a clue.

Taken to stage 2 by the program’s chief Capt. George Cummings (Sam Shepard who must love playing a military pilot that much), the action moves to the USS Abraham Lincoln (actual ship: the USS Nimitz) where the human pilots are introduced to a surprise fourth member of the team: the EDI UCAV (that’s Extreme Deep Invader Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle to you) (voiced by Wentworth Miller doing his best Douglas Rain as HAL 9000 impression). An AI with the capacity to learn from the humans around it, EDI — or Tinman as the plane is dubbed by the ever sassy Purcell — picks up most of Lt. Gannon’s bad habits in just one mission. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pick up Gannon’s shy smile or pretty blue eyes. Nor, as Gannon points out, does it pick up a human’s instincts or morality. “War shouldn’t be some sort of video game,” Gannon tells his captain.

There is a lot wrong with this movie starting with the fact that it feels rushed. The plot moves snap-snap-snap which in this day and age of short attention spans is probably necessary but may not be a good thing. It also hammers us over the head with the idea that knowledge is a powerful thing: witness the bowls of apples in every single space belonging to Capt. Cummings (hint: he might be a bad guy). The writer and director do pull off one bit of sly staging that keys off of Plato’s famous “shadows on the cave wall” story about the quest for knowledge but that isn’t enough to make up for the pat characterizations (the Black guy is oversexed, the leader is a sensitive risk-taker, and the female specializes in assessing the “collateral damage” (ie: how many living people will be killed) for each mission), or for the fact that the film makers ignore the basic laws of physics (OK, I’ll suspend disbelief to accept secure, instantaneous data transmissions over tens of thousands of miles; I’ll believe we can get pilots up to mock 4 without any ill effects; I’ll even believe the upper-atmosphere refueling station, but there’s no way you’re going to get me to believe that a multi-ton aircraft falls slower than a 135lb pilot).

For stealing from just about every modern action film made (make yourself a score card and see if you can spot the cribbing: I found bits from Top Gun, An Officer and a Gentleman, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and 2001: A Space Odyssey), and for the nearly all Incubus soundtrack, I have to give this movie 1 popcorn out of 5.

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