By James Bowman on 8.2.05 @ 12:02AM
Another stupid movie gets through under the radar.
Watch out, folks! There is a new generation of movie technology
that has been designed to sneak in under the critical radar and
release its lethal payload before anyone knows it has been there,
wreaking havoc with the taste and intelligence of a whole
generation of movie-goers who are unfortunate enough to find
themselves in its path of destruction. This is much more terrifying
as a cultural weapon than the robot plane called EDI (for Extreme
Deep Invader) is as a weapon of futuristic war in the new movie
Stealth. The fiendish cleverness of the movie technology
is that the central importance of its technically accomplished
special effects so crowds out such critically important but more
traditional matters as plot and characterization that there is
nothing left for a critic to criticize. The fiendish cleverness of
the airplane's technology is, well, conventional.
To give it its due, Stealth, directed by Rob Cohen from
a screenplay by W.D. Richter, tries to liven things up with a sort
of original twist whose absurdity is hardly noticeable amidst so
much absurdity. Not to give anything away, but it has to do with
whether EDI (voice of Wentworth Miller) is a good guy or a bad guy.
There is a reason why robots generally turn out to be bad guys.
From the sinister HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey to last
year's I, Robot, the movies have generally found it to be
a better story when the little metal guys are out to get us than
when they are cute and adorable as they are in the Star
Wars movies. The bad-guy robot is a version of the
Frankenstein myth, which is in turn an early technological
redaction of the myth of Prometheus, an object lesson in humanity's
hubris in seeking to attain to godlike status. The good guy robot
is nothing but a wisecracking Disney sidekick. EDI is a little of
both. Which he turns out to be in the end I will not reveal, but as
the good robot he's short of a wisecrack or two and as the bad
robot he's less a lesson in hubris and nemesis than in political
skullduggery of the most boringly predictable kind.
The movie begins by filling us in on the Naval Air Force (the
what?) of the near future. Guess who the enemy is? Terrorists!
Guess how we have to deal with them? Not by face-to-face combat but
the highest of high tech. And if there are three and only three
pilots chosen to fly the planes that are the highest tech of all,
see if you can guess their race and gender. Right you are! One
white guy, one black guy, and one chick. What are the odds of that,
do you suppose? Oh, and the chick is a knockout in a C-cup and a
teeny-weenie bikini. Of course they are all both impossibly
handsome and the best of friends -- at least until love threatens
to break up their little band of brothers. But maybe you could have
predicted that too? Fortunately, when Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas) falls
for his "wingman," Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), in defiance of
regulations, Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) is happy to settle for the
consolation prize of a gorgeous Thai girl (Jaypetch Toonchalong)
who not only doesn't fly but doesn't even speak English.
It will be observed that this movie is a techno-geek's dream in
more ways than one. The development of love out of easy camaraderie
smacks of the imaginary warfare of comic book science fiction or
Starship Troopers. In the wars of the future, we can well
imagine, all the Top Guns will have cute little blonde wingmen in
C-cups to snuggle up with. And is there just the lightest of
propagandistic touches in the Christian name of Lt. Wade? Both
proponents and opponents of the relaxation of rules prohibiting
women in combat will remember very clearly the name of Lt. Kara
Hultgreen, who crashed her F-14 and died while trying to land on
the same ship featured in this movie, the USS Abraham
Lincoln, in 1994. EDI the robot may or may not be a harbinger
of future warfare, but the dream of an ideal world in which Lt.
Kara flies again clearly lives on.
Whether or not, too, the robot is a bad guy, you know from the
moment he struts across the screen that the gung ho advocate of
naval robotics played by Sam Shepard is going to be up to no good.
That close-cropped military type who smokes cigars and scoffs at
the quaint scruples of the beautiful pilots is bound to be working
in cahoots with some corrupt politician back in (gasp!) Washington.
"You are pilots of the U.S. Navy," he says to the beautiful ones.
"I expect nothing less than perfection." The scoundrel!
The story and the characters, in other words, are ludicrously
unreal and cliched all at once. But the more awful it is as an
action-adventure yarn, the more it becomes impossible to see
anything in it but the great visuals of futuristic airplanes
zooming about the skies and making very gratifying large
explosions. How could there be anything to criticize about that?
The real stealth here is the stealth with which a stupid movie gets
past our critical defenses by pretending to be nothing more than
cool pictures.
topics:
Movies, Military
