Red Tails: Tuskegee Airmen Deliver

Out this week is Red Tails. This new war film depicts the top fighter pilots from the Tuskegee training program. The second I discovered what this film was going to be about, I knew I was in for a doozy. You see, I cry at war movies, and I cry at movies with social injustice. And here is a delightful combination of both. I was sure that in this movie, we would be treated to the horrors of war, and there’d be a liberal peppering of racism throughout the whole of it. Wonderful. Of course, this film is as historically inaccurate as 300 or Inglorious Bastards, but it holds to the long tradition of martial glorification, and it does a decent job of it.

This film starts with a title card that explains that the Tuskegee training program was composed of African American pilots. It was an experimental program that was offered as a concession to the black community. It was simply a concession because everybody knew back then that it was ludicrous to think that any black person could be intelligent and skilled enough to handle any sort of technical machinery as intricate as an aircraft. Do you see what I mean? War stuff, social tensions…this one was definitely going to be a doozy.

Now, I was correct in assuming that I would lose it many times (I got teary in the first 30 seconds), but this film does not overwhelm. It is not meant to shock you into a state of jibbering incoherence. It is not meant to be an overly unpleasant experience. It was actually pretty tame stuff. This film is on par with the WWII films released in the forties. I constantly felt like Lee Marvin and John Wayne were hovering close behind me, but this time there was also racial injustice. It’s kind of nice to acknowledge that this crap happened instead of glossing over it like almost every other WWII film has done. And considering that the focus of this film was the Tuskegee airmen, I’d say that the filmmakers were extremely restrained.

Now, there were times when I felt that things were overly milquetoast, but perhaps those moments of blandness were simply meant to serve functions that I did not care about. These may have been moments that reached out to other demographics, thus leaving me in the lurch for a few seconds. Or these could have been moments that served the genre. There was a lot of grand standing, pilots near their planes looking cinematic, and these moments seemed to go on for just a bit too long. It’s like all those annoying overly-long shots in The English Patient or Legends of the Fall. And I know that WWII movies of the forties have lots of these shots, but that doesn’t make the shots any less annoying. So perhaps the movie suffers a bit in order to pay homage, but then again, the homage is kind of cool… so perhaps if they had just edited a few nanoseconds here and there, it would have been perfect.

But then again-again…I think this film was also released in 3D, and I have noticed that films released in 3D seem to be slow to the eye in 2D. Is that a thing? Maybe it’s a thing. So I suppose you should see it in 3D just in case that makes it a tad bit better. But even in 2D the visuals were stunning. It’s everything Howard Hughes ever wished for.

And the narrative aspects weren’t so shabby either. The main characters were a motley assortment that came together to form the Red Tails, and each had their own particular sub-plot. The writers and actors did a great tandem job here. These men were real and visceral, but they were also real to the time being depicted, and on top of all of that, they were real to the stereotypical types within these kinds of war movies. Doesn’t it seem like it would be a pretty hard task to capture the now-ness, the then-ness, and the plastic-ness of a thing all at once? Well that’s how these characters are depicted. They just jump off the screen. There’s the dedicated Colonel A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) who will fight to give his men the chance to prove themselves and fight for their country. And Captain Marty ‘Easy’ Julian (Nate Parker) is the overachieving son of a judge who is constantly perfect yet lives in his father’s shadow anyway—Easy takes a drink now and then to take the edge off. Then there’s pilot Ray ‘Junior’ Gannon (Tristan Wilds). Junior is young and looks younger. He can’t stand it. He mastered flight school and is looking forward to studying engineering once the war is over, but he can’t shake the nickname “junior.” But this becomes of little importance once he is captured behind enemy lines. Not only is he a war criminal, he is the only BLACK war criminal in a camp made up of white American war criminals. Do you see what I mean? The characters are loveable and flawed and all of a sudden you realize that it’s like one of those black and white war movies from the fifties, but with better effects and with black people.

All in all this is a WWII movie that you can take your grandparents to see. It has mass appeal and is therefore requisitely bland, but in an enjoyable, popcorn-eating way. The action sequences are pretty and they have satisfying violence, but not in a gory way that might turn off the average movie goer.