Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.0

Red Tails Blu-ray Movie Review

A dramatic clunker with jet-propelled visuals.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 18, 2012

As an aviation history nerd, I always geek out at the possibilities of another big-budget dogfighting film. But since I've been burned recently— Flyboys, I'm looking at you—I approached Red Tails with cautious expectations. Now, I had no doubts that executive producer George Lucas—who worked on this project for 20-odd years before getting it off the ground, so to speak—could impressively recreate WWII-era air battles. I wasn't worried about that in the slightest. After all, this is the guy who has long-claimed the 1927 film Wings as the inspiration for the interstellar dogfighting in Star Wars. He knows his stuff when it comes to aerial combat. What he has trouble with is what we might call the human element of his films. The dialogue. The storytelling. The tone. My main concern was that Red Tails would adopt the campy 1930s-serials quality of the Star Wars prequels, with cardboard characters, almost comically evil villains, and cornball, Hallmark-card sentimentality. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened. Although the film was directed by Anthony Hemingway and written by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder, you get the immediate sense that it was Lucas who held all the creative control. Red Tails suffers from the kind of willfully outdated nostalgia that's now his signature style, a naive retreat to simpler times that were never really as simple as Lucas imagines.

Tuskegee Airmen

Red Tails is basically a popcorn war movie, and the Tuskegee Airmen—the heroes of the film—deserve a better cinematic tribute. For those that might need a history refresher, the Tuskegee pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group were the first African-American aviators in U.S. military history, at a time when the armed forces were completely segregated. The film opens with a quote from an Army War College study that sums up the jaw- droppingly awful attitudes of the day: "Blacks are mentally inferior, by nature subservient, and cowards in the face of danger. They are therefore unfit for combat." The fliers of the 332nd, then, were engaging a two-front war, battling German pilots in the air and fighting the inherent racism of the U.S. Army on the ground. Ultimately, they more than proved themselves, destroying 261 enemy aircraft and losing only 25 bombers during 179 escort missions. White bomber pilots began referring to the Tuskegee fliers as "Red Tailed Angels," after the distinctive markings on the 332nd's planes.

The movie details the group's perseverance in the face of discrimination and follows the 332nd through several "Inspired by True Events" sorties. When we open in Italy, 1944, the Tuskegee Airmen, commanded by pipe-chomping Major Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.), have been relegated to routine missions far from the front, flying worn-out secondhand P-40 Warcraft. Back at the Pentagon, Major Stance's commanding officer, Colonel Bullard (Terrence Howard), is fighting his own private war against institutional racism, attempting to convince his superiors—including Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston—that the 332nd should be given higher priority missions. The Tuskegee fliers finally get their shot during Operation Shingle, supporting allied troops landing on a beach at Anzio, where they down eight German fighters and destroy another 63 aircraft on the ground. This gets the attention of the top brass, who agree to outfit the group with brand-new P-51s—the fastest propeller-driven planes ever built— and send them on bomber escort runs far behind enemy lines.

Of course, that's the widest angled view of the story; when we zoom in, Red Tails is about the individual airmen, their camaraderie, and their collective struggle for respect. The movie centers on four flyers: reckless Joe "Lightening" Little (David Oyelowo), the overly cautious alcoholic "Easy" Julian (Nate Parker), fresh-faced "Junior" Gannon (Tristen Wilds), and Samuel "Joker" George (Elijah Kelly), all of whom can be tidily summed up by their nicknames. Their conflicts are just as one-dimensional and undeveloped as their characters. Lightening is wooing an Italian girl and has an uneasy rivalry with Easy. Junior gets shot down and captured by the Germans. Easy feels responsible. I'm not sure about Joker because I honestly can't remember a single thing he does in the film. So it goes.

The movie gets exactly one thing right—the rip-roaring aerial combat sequences, pitting the Tuskegee boys in their P-51s against swarms of German Messerschmitt Bf 109s and, later, the speedy Me 262s, the world's first operational jet fighter. Most all of these scenes are CGI'd—with the pilots shot against green screen in mock-up cockpits—but they're thrillingly choreographed and do a fine job of temporarily distracting you from how hokey and poorly written the story is otherwise.

When Lucas appeared on The Daily Show to shill the movie, he described it as "very patriotic, very jingoistic, old-fashioned, [and] corny," comparing it to films like The Flying Leathernecks that were made shortly after the war. But these qualities—expressed in Lucas' own words— are precisely why Red Tails doesn't work. Audiences simply don't respond well to "old-fashioned" and "corny" anymore, and after the Iraq War we're appropriately wary of jingoism. Red Tails continuously struggles to find a consistent tonal balance, swinging wildly between historical realism and cartoonish adventure. German pilots, for instance, are reduced to scowling, unintentionally hilarious stereotypes who utter lines like "Show no mercy!" and "Die you foolish African!" This might fit fine in the Indiana Jones series, but it doesn't make much sense here. Even the issue of racism is dealt with—if you'll pardon the pun—in a strictly black and white way. There's no complexity or nuance to the script, just flat characterizations and flatter dialogue. It's admirable that George Lucas wants to honor the Tuskegee Airmen—and I love that he self-financed the film when the big studios told him they couldn't market a movie with a predominantly black cast—but Red Tails lacks gravity and just doesn't do the real-life story justice.

Red Tails Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As you'd expect from a top-tier, Lucas-approved release, Red Tails looks fantastic on Blu-ray, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded digital-to-digital transfer framed in a 2:40:1 aspect ratio. The film was shot with Sony's CineAlta F35 high definition cameras, and the resulting image has a crisp, vibrant, nearly noiseless look that—for better or worse—sets Red Tails apart from the grungier, desaturated aesthetic of most recent war movies. You almost get the sense that Lucas and Co. were going for the digital equivalent of a big budget mid-century Technicolor quality. (Though, I don't really get the very 1980s-ish opening titles.) The level of clarity throughout is almost always excellent, with fine textures easily visible in tell-tale areas like the airmen's faces and leather flight jackets, and while the CGI is sometimes a bit obvious, the digitally created planes and aerodrome environments are also exceptionally detailed. Color is bright and vivid—reds, especially—and highlights have a soft, creamy cast that gives the otherwise obviously digital image a slightly antiqued appearance. Source noise is rarely visible from a distance, and I didn't notice any overt banding, blocking, artifacts, or other compression/encode issues. A gorgeous Blu-ray experience, all around.

Red Tails Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

No surprise here, either. We're talking LucasFilms and THX, so you know the audio's going to rock you like the proverbial hurricane. If you're an audiophile, you already know that the film was the first to theatrically feature Barco's Auro-3D 11.1 sound format, which is capable of creating the aural illusion of depth and height. While the full experience sadly can't be ported over to Blu-ray, Red Tails features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track that delivers all the sonic action—and more—that you'd expect from a WWII dogfighting film, with pinpoint directionality and some of the most seamlessly convincing cross-channel movements I've heard in a while. Engaging doesn't quite cut it as a descriptor. Turn this track up loud and you'll want to physically dodge the bullets you'll think are coming at you from all sides. P-51s tear through the soundfield, to and from (almost) every conceivable direction. Engines roar and propellers beat the air. Explosions rock with subwoofer-assisted oomph. During the big aerial firefights there's just so much going on audio-wise, with the mix frequently tracking the movements and positions of multiple planes as they flip and roll and fire at each other. Even in the quieter scenes, the track features plenty of subtle environmental ambience, from quiet crickets outside to barroom chatter in the whites-only officer's club. The film's score was composed by influential jazz trumpeter Terrence Blanchard, who mixes in drumline/marching band elements with a huge orchestra, and the music, if a bit too emotionally obvious at times, sounds fantastic—big and full and textured. There were a few moments when I thought the dialogue might've been a bit too low in the mix, but never to the extent that I'd consider docking the score. If this mix doesn't deserve full marks, I'm not sure what does.

The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, along with an English Dolby Digital Surround mix, a 5.1 descriptive audio track, and Spanish and Québécois French Dolby Digital 5.1 dubs.

Red Tails Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Double Victory: The Tuskegee Airmen at War (1080p, 1:05:07): Narrated by Cuba Gooding, Jr., this hour-long documentary traces the history of the Tuskegee airmen from their training days until after the war, featuring interviews with several of the surviving pilots. A must-watch that's frankly better than the film itself.
• George Lucas: Executive Producer (1080p, 3:26): Lucas briefly explains the history of the project.
• Anthony Hemingway: Director (1080p, 5:30): Likewise, Hemingway describes how he got involved with the project. We also get to see the cast meeting with some real Tuskegee airmen.
• Terrance Blanchard: Composer (1080p, 6:15): A short featurette about the scoring of the film.
• The Cast of Red Tails (1080p, 25:11): The second most substantive extra on the disc features interviews with all of the main cast members and lots of behind-the-scenes footage.
• Movie Magic (1080p, 5:12): A look at the extremely detailed CGI needed to recreate WWII on screen.

Red Tails Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I've been obsessed with the Tuskegee Airmen ever since I was a kid building balsa-wood model airplanes in his bedroom, so I really wanted to like Red Tails. Unfortunately, the film stalls and plummets, weighed down by some of the same narrative mistakes that have wrecked other George Lucas productions--stilted dialogue, one-note characters, and artificially forced emotion. Still, I managed to set aside my critical faculties for a bit and at least enjoy some of the movie's kickass dogfights. If you're looking for a weighty, complicated war film you're going to be disappointed, but those after simple guns a'blazing aerial action might be passably entertained. Red Tails certainly brings the eye and ear candy on Blu-ray, with a gorgeous high definition picture and truly immersive sound. The best thing about this release, though? The hour-long documentary about the real Tuskegee Airmen included in the bonus features, which is better than the film itself by far and possibly worth the price of the disc alone.