Red Tails (2012) Review

rating: ****

the story: Tuskegee airmen perform heroics during WWII.

review: Until Top Gun: Maverick exploded at the box office last year, I was, like many other filmgoers, overlooking one of the original joys of Star Wars: the X-Wing run down the Death Star trench.  It's easy to forget the appeal of the sequence when the focus so often shifts to the world-building, the characters, the tension of the moment, but really, it's a holdover of the fighter pilot era best defined by WWII, and by the release of the original Top Gun, fast receding into the past.  Incredibly, George Lucas never featured that exact kind of storytelling again, until Red Tails, which he developed much earlier than its release date suggests, but kept getting turned down by studios (yes, even though it came from George Lucas), he contends, because it features an almost entirely black cast.

Lucas himself doesn't direct Tails, though by all accounts of his filmmaking career it's extremely difficult to imagine he stayed far behind during production (he's credited with direct involvement only during reshoots).  In effect this was his big goodbye to the world of film, before Disney kicked off the new Star Wars era without him.  The whole thing is basically one long excuse to immerse deeply into the dog-fighting Luke Skywalker experiences for just one moment in 1977, though its grounding in the all-black squadron history subsequently unearthed is probably far more personal to Lucas than it might be supposed, given his childhood memories of the black community around him and the black woman he married later in life.  Star Wars fans who always complained there wasn't enough black representation in the saga would have you believe otherwise, but Lucas himself never had a problem with black people.

The actors in Tails would be a highlight in any film, and by this point had been, including Cuba Gooding, Jr., whose breakthrough performance in Jerry Maguire was a tough act to follow, and basically he tried everything and never found traction.  He's joined by Terrence Howard, one of the modern era's great actors, frequently sabotaged by the reputation of being difficult to work with.  Howard appears in a very similar movie, Hart's War, which covers a sequence omitted in Tails of what happens to a black soldier in German captivity.  They're surrounded by an embarrassment of riches, including Leslie Odom, Jr. (later associated with Hamilton), Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker (whose Birth of a Nation was crippled by allegations made against him), and David Oyelowo, whose least rewarding performance, to date, for me anyway, was MLK in Selma.  Otherwise, as Tails again proves, he's an overlooked treasure, easily the star just below Howard and Gooding of the movie.

The politics of what films gain recognition are so byzantine it's sometimes impossible to navigate, but something like Red Tails is worth the effort to discover.