Review: Red Tails

There’s good reason to make a Tuskegee Airmen film (or another one; there have been a handful already), and Lucas has been talking about his Red Tails project since well before there was a Jar Jar Binks or a jibbering monkey colloquially named Shia LaBeouf. Legendarily, Lucas cut World War II dogfight footage into the climax of Star Wars when he needed something to show the visual effects team in terms of the speed and motion of the spacecraft, so the notion of Lucasfilm finally circling back around and making a proper World War II dogfight movie is not without its appeal. Red Tails the film, though, categorically demonstrates two things: Industrial Light and Magic has come a hell of a long way from that warehouse in Van Nuys, at the apparent expense of every last shred of its soul; and George Lucas is such a dimwit as a storyteller at this point that he could probably find a way to fuck up a phone call.

Red Tails can be digested in microcosm in a single scene. The Tuskegee Airmen – the American Air Force’s single all-black fighter squadron – are tasked to protect a flotilla of bombers en route to an enemy target. The plexiglass-sparkly digital effects adequately convey the mass and zip of the aircraft; the cadre of principal Tuskegee characters exchange first-draft quips with one another as all hell breaks loose above; and the film cuts constantly to the cockpit of the lead bomber, where the white pilots tell one another – and, you know, Us, The Audience – how they (at first) can’t believe they’re stuck with a bunch of worthless black pilots! and then (by the end) how much they hope they’ll get to fly with the Red Tails again.

This is the problem. It isn’t that Lucas has sanded away any modern-day script detailing in an effort at timeless, old-Hollywood optimism; it’s that he’s sanded so much of the thing away that we’re left with raw, shapeless wood where there deserves to be, by my reckoning anyway, a more nuanced, contoured story. Rather than sensitively addressing the subject matter and its significance, Red Tails seems content to whack back and forth between twin, blunt assertions of “these men were awesome” and “being black in a racist society is sad.” It’s so inexcusably simple-minded that it tips over into condescension, willfully ignoring a century of black cinema as though Red Tails is the first kick at giving an entire racial history an onscreen voice. 

Red Tails is such a dramatically fruitless motion picture that vast chunks of it could likely be played in any order and the film would still arrive at the same effect. The principal characters don’t really have any problems or interior lives – one of them has a girlfriend in the village; another carries a Flash Gordon ray gun, in a nod to The Beard – and they pretty much exist solely to jump into their planes every 20 minutes and go on a mission. The action sequences are exciting, if uninvolving. The higher-ups, meanwhile, act out a kind of live-action Bunraku performance of Why Racism Is Bad, with Terrence Howard (as the squadron commander) swelling up with glistening self-importance every time he gets to insist to someone that His Boys Deserve A Chance, Damn It!

Yeah, the effects are pretty good, but they were pretty good in Pearl Harbour, too, and that’s not a recommendation to anyone. Actually, I’d say Industrial Light and Magic’s A-game as a motion picture effects provider stalled at some point in the last decade. They’ve arrived at a sheeny impasse that keeps them about 5% away from the truer photorealism that Weta and other digital effects houses are regularly providing. Everything looks arty and animated, but that’s exactly the problem. At no point do you think a film camera is up there in the sky, capturing any of the visual information. It’s all clearly the product of the pixel-pushers, and if it’s cut together well by Lucasfilm staple Ben Burtt, then the film also completely disintegrates from an editorial perspective in the second half, when it’s trying to sustain what seem to be a handful of plot threads so random, they may just as well have been drawn from a hat.

Red Tails reminded me quite a bit of Lucas’ television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, in two key ways. Firstly, this is a TV project, through and through; Anthony Hemingway, the ostensible director, is a TV shooter who graduates to the big-time without mentally graduating his skill set. He makes the film like a TV director would: he arrives on the day, captures the pages that need capturing, and never takes a step back to consider the bigger picture, because from his vantage point, his duties are just to deliver content into the machine. I can’t necessarily blame him under the circumstances, but it’s a sorry debut nevertheless.

Second, more importantly, the ghosts of Young Indy rise in the stupidly over-earnest, and dramatically half-handed, approach to the key driver of the entire project: the history. As was his whimsical penchant during the run of the Young Indy series, Lucas has cherry-picked an interesting piece of 20^th-Century historical trivia that he’d like These Kids Today to know about; and as with most of the episodes of that show, he has constructed a trite, and in most cases entirely arbitrary, narrative around that history.  There’s no arc or curve to the story, because aside from the basic historical data, there is (in Lucas’ mind, I suppose) no need for one.

The film will doubtless gain some moderate rewatchability on American military bases around the world, where the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen is a disproportionately high ratio of low-income minorities in the armed forces. Red Tails will also be the movie that a new generation of middle school history teachers show on a late-term Friday afternoon, while the boys and girls put more serious thought into what it must be like to be outside, in the sunshine, instead of stuck in here with the windows shut.