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.

Iron Man (2008)

rating: ***

the story: Tony Stark is Iron Man.

what it's all about: I've never found Iron Man to be a particularly good movie.  It opened the same year as The Dark Knight, which to my mind was a great movie.  And of course it gave birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which eventually became the only superhero movie franchise(s) anyone really took seriously.  I liked Iron Man 2 a great deal, but the first one?  I never felt particularly compelled to watch it again, and in fact it took me ten years (yesterday) to do so again, and my impression of it didn't at all change.  This is odd for a number of reasons.  One isn't really that it took me so long to rewatch it, but that I really didn't feel like doing so for so long.  Instant desire to rewatch was something I had for Dark Knight.  I couldn't get enough of Dark Knight.  I like superhero movies.  I like superheroes in general.  Yeah, I'm a DC guy.  By this I mean I tend to like DC superheroes and DC storytelling.  It's not just the superheroes but the storytelling, too.  Marvel doesn't often think of its superheroes in the same way DC does.  At the movies, there's really just Logan and the two Amazing Spider-Man movies.  Then there's stuff like the cartoonish logic of Bryan Singer's first two X-Men, Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man flicks.  Ironically by the third one, which looked the most cartoonish, he finally went somewhere real.  So of course fans hated it.

Fans loved Iron Man instantly.  Visually it already looked timeless.  It still looks timeless.  The look of the armor matches up exactly in credibility with what you see in Avengers: Infinity War, ten years later.  That's pretty good.  It looks totally different than anything superhero movies had done before.  That was what made Raimi's Spider-Man pop, what made audiences "believe a man can fly" in 1978.  In that sense, of course the MCU took over the popular imagination.  It did something no one had seen before, and that always hooks the masses. 

But in terms of storytelling...It's awful.  Just...awful.

Tony Stark is sold as a tech genius.  Great!  Fantastic!  In 2008, Steve Jobs was a cultural icon!  Totally legit!  But...Tony Stark isn't sold as a Steve Jobs tech genius.  He's sold as...a weapons manufacturer.  And that's all he's known for.  And...when he says he won't make weapons again...that's it.  He's apparently done.  Forever.  And yet...We see his private lab, and he's got robots working for him.  He's got J.A.R.V.I.S., the virtual assistant who would later merge with the android Vision.  The rest of the world?  Doesn't have those robots.  Doesn't have J.A.R.V.I.S.  I think Siri wasn't a thing yet, in 2008.  Alexa wasn't a thing.  And of course, Tony famously keeps Iron Man to himself. 

Logistically this is idiotic.  In every single sense.  It only makes sense if you're trying to explain how Iron Man happens.  But in the real world, Iron Man makes no sense.  At all.  So you have to either accept the insanity of it or you can't.  And you see how idiotic the whole plot is.

Even as a weapons manufacturer, taking away everything else, Tony Stark makes no sense as a huge celebrity, appearing on every major magazine cover, as depicted in the film.  Weapons manufacturers aren't celebrities.  Name one.  The only "name" weapons developer I can think of is Oppenheimer, and he was never celebrated like this.  When Iron Man 2 shows a vintage video of Tony Stark's dad, it's clearly a pastiche of...Walt Disney.  Hilarious, considering the first two Iron Man movies were distributed by...Paramount.

But even the conceit of Tony being captured in the midst of a weapons demonstration...in the field of engagement...That's stupid.  I'm really sure that would never happen.  And then he gets captured.  And he's got shrapnel in his chest, so the bad guys...have the ability to give him tech that needs to be inserted onto/into his chest.  That can also be modified to power a suit of armor he makes.  Because.

This is the sort of nitpicking fans routinely give movies and/or TV shows they hate.  Usually, I try really hard not to do it, because nitpicking usually is even more idiotic than what these fans are attempting to portray as idiotic.  It's insipid.  It's a poor way to analyze something.  In this instance, though, these were problems I noticed immediately.  I don't normally instantly have these sorts of problems.  I hate how Singer uses Professor X as a macguffin in the first two X-Men movies.  Both times the exact same way.  It's lazy storytelling, something that needs to happen in order to move the story along because no one bothered to think the story through.  In other words, I'm not talking about nitpicking at all (mindlessly being annoyed by story elements while attempting to portray yourself as smarter than the people who developed them), but bad storytelling.  I always hate bad storytelling. 

And Iron Man is, again, beyond anything else, bad storytelling. 

The worst thing?  Even as it completely rejuvenates Robert Downey Jr.'s career, making him far more popular and relevant than he's ever been...Iron Man completely wastes and trashes Jeff Bridges in the process.  How does that even happen???  And you can sort of tell that it motivated him to seek better material, as suddenly he went into a whole career renaissance (Crazy Heart, True Grit, Hell or High Water) with material that was nothing like his lifeless role in Iron Man, the grizzled iconoclast Tony Stark only wishes he'll become, the culmination of everything Bridges had done before.

And Terrence Howard?  Marvel has Terrence Howard, and...nope.  Not in Iron Man 2.  How does that even happen???  Faran Tahir, who would turn up as a Starfleet captain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, lamented playing a terrorist in Iron Man.  Do you think he ever changed his mind?  In Iron Man 3 they change the whole idea of Tahir's role, giving the lead-up to the Mandarin to a sham played by Ben Kingsley.  They try and pretend real terrorists were never a part of the story.  Yeah!

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, the Tony Stark assistant who in 2018 would probably be cheering on #MeToo, but instead becomes a slow-burning love interest, who puts up with all of Tony's antics...because.  They never even try to develop her character, not in Iron Man, not in any other appearance.  Clark Gregg, in his first appearance as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, is mostly asked to dance around the joke of what S.H.I.E.L.D. actually stands for aside from a very elaborate excuse for an acronym.  Leslie Bibb plays a hot chick who's also a reporter for Vanity Fair, which is one of those inexplicable magazines smitten with weapons manufacturer Tony Stark.

Really, it's only Downey Jr. and Bettany who appear fully-formed and presentable for future appearances.  Good solid foundation, sure, but...

We learn late in the movie that Bridges' character was in cahoots with Tahir all along, that he set up Tony to die, as he did his father, to kill the golden goose, because...That part is never really made clear.  It would make sense if it were because either Stark had figured out what he was doing, but...Yeah.  Not in this movie.  Not in any movie.  He just likes to do away with tech geniuses, I guess.  The movie goes out of its way to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only is Tony the only person capable of creating the tech he does, but that Bridges' character isn't even in the conversation.  In the era of Steve Jobs?  Bill Gates?  Steve Wozniak???

The funny thing about all this is that 2011's Green Lantern actually borrows a lot of Iron Man's story elements, and does them better, and fans insist to this day that it's a badly made movie, full of plot holes.  Really???  In the interests of full disclosure, Green Lantern is based on a DC superhero, and so you can call bias if you like, but for me it's still storytelling.  Green Lantern has great storytelling.  Iron Man doesn't.

So Iron Man 2 follows it with infinitely better storytelling.  Fans disagree.  But the insanely popular MCU happens anyway.  I can't possibly be upset about that.  There's still good material that results from it, the Captain America movies notably. 

I'd hope that in the years to come, anyone looking to revisit the whole thing recognizes the first one in the sequence for what it is: a ridiculous mess.