stealth

Militarily, stealth means not being detected.

A stealth plane is designed such that normal modes of detection are rendered difficult, if not impossible. So it means things like reducing heat signatures, in order than thermal imaging can't see you. It means designing your plane such that radar beams are bounced away, rather than back towards the sender. It means coating your plane in radar absorbent material. Stuff like that.

As such, the first ten minutes of the film kinda show you that 'stealth' is perhaps the poorest name for the film Stealth as you could get. Within those first ten minutes, the supposedly stealthy aircraft get locked onto by two missiles and fired at with reasonable accuracy by various radar-guided AAA.

They also fly so low as to be easily visible to their targets. Not to mention the aerobatic, stunt-like antics they engage in on that mission.

It's fair to say then that stealth isn't the most militarily accurate film. But then, to be really fair, I don't think it was the goal of stealth to be militarily accurate. The goal was more one of entertainment.

And in this regard it generally succeeds. The action stuff is thrilling; Jessica Biel's bottom is a delight to behold and the plot is passable.

Passable is about all I'd give it, though. The problem is it feels a bit too sanitized and a bit too familiar.

So there's a bit of a rather predictable romantic frisson between Biel's bottom and the main character. The other guy in the team is black and, well, let's just say it's fairly predictable what happens to him.

There's also an AI system in one of the planes that, and I don't want to get too spoilery here, 'goes haywire'. Then there's the team's boss who, again, not wanting to get too spoilery, but kinda does what you might expect him to do.

And that's the problem I had - there's nothing here that you haven't seen plenty of times before. Admittedly it doesn't do it badly, and the film is very pretty to look at (especially in the Alba department), but ultimately it's a fairly vacuous experience.

But it was the sanitisation that pushed things over the edge for me.

The point of these planes, it would seem, is that they're fighter-bombers. So as well as all the dog fighting they do, their role is also one of dropping bombs on bad guys.

In this case, the bad guys are nondescript 'terrorists'. Ooh, nasty men. Not that we're given any actual evidence that they're nasty men. We're just told they're terrorists and then the 'good guys' drop bombs on them.

We know they're good guys because a) they're all-American pilots and b) they go to extraordinary lengths to avoid killing civilians/non-combatants.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind them showing soldiers disobeying orders, it's just here it seems a bit extreme here. The issue of collateral damage and civilian deaths seems to be ignored by the commanding officers, when in reality they'd not be like that.

It just leaves an odd taste in the mouth