Red Tails

George Lucas produced this movie about the Tuskegee airmen, a black pilot squadron in WW2.   The story begins in the middle of the airmen's struggle to get respect.  The squadron has already been formed and spend their time on unchallenging assignments.  They want to be in the air and fight the Jerries, for heaven's sake!


The main pilot characters (played by Nate Parker, David Oyelowo, Tristan Wilds, Method Man and others) are the typical types--one falls for a local girl and is a hot dog ace, one cannot handle the stress and drinks, one is medically unfit but pressures his friends to let him fly, one is a newcomer trying to gain respect. None of their homelife or backstory is referred to, so for the audience only the timeframe of the movie is what defines them for us.  The two senior leaders are played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terrence Howard.  The Major (Gooding) tries to keep the men in line at the base, and smokes a pipe a la MacArthur (he was the one with the pipe, wasn't he)? Or more correctly, he always has a pipe in his mouth but I never see him smoking it.  Terrence Howard as the Colonel had a bit better role as he got to emote more as the one who has to battle Washington to give them respect.


This is a pretty formulaic picture. I kept thinking of the movie Memphis Belle. It feels like it was made by white people (although both director and writer are black) and could have been made a couple generations ago. If white actors were casted this would be not much different than any other feel good WW2 movie, other than the racism element, which is pretty tame (one black pilot wandering into a whites only club gets in a fight but after he is arrested by MPs he doesn't have a scratch on him). The "Tuskegee" element is hardly referred to or explained, not made historically important enough.  I can't imagine why real people have been homogenized like this. 

For some reason it seemed like the production could only afford one actor who could speak German as they kept coming up against the same caricatured German pilot again and again, and other German characters are just faceless men they don't interact with.  The majority of caucasian characters only serve specific purposes to the plot--a general who supports them, one who is a bigot, bomber airmen who realize the Tuskegee group is an asset--and are not rounded out in any way.

George Lucas had a real chance to make something of this picture, especially if he supposedly spent 20 or 30 years trying to get it made (and why?  A perfectly fine film of the Tuskegee airmen was made in 1995).  His contemporary Steven Spielberg made Schindler's List, a story that was personal to him as a Jewish individual. This movie has nothing personal to Lucas or even the black experience. It is a big miss for me.