Normally, I don't do detail accuracy criticism about anything coming out of Okeefenokee West, particularly about war movies and most definitely particularly in the past 25 years as the place has been taken over by the intergalactic widgetmakers.
Thanks for the analysis. Fudge a little here, fudge a lot there, seems to be the norm these days, when the truthful account would serve as well, or better.
Since I have been coming here my FB feed has become packed with a steady stream of WWII aircraft of all descriptions (several P-38s just today), and some later jets that I have never heard of. You don't think that FB has been.....naw, they wouldn't do that.
Just click on an ad for anything ANYWHERE, and see how fast Google and Facebook swing to the wretched task of filling your feed with ads for the same things you looked for, whether on eBay or any ad on the web - it is all tied together in the Great Internet Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Amazon does it, too, but in this case four friends have also seen this in their "Amazon recommends" - an ad for "The Frozen Chosen," still plugging along with sales good enough to show up in the author's royalty statement, eight years since original publication.
Information got better when the files were opened in the 1990s - among other things, my good friend Royce Williams was able to prove he did indeed shoot down four MiG-15s on November 18, 1952, when the Russians provided their names in 1992; he eventually got a Navy Cross for it last year. Unfortunately, Putin then cut off the access in 2005, so we have what we have, but don't have what we could go look for before.
jeez, Tom...I was so hoping they wouldn't screw the pooch, but you know the specifics of this stuff a lot better than I do.
I loved "Band of Brothers" (which created, like, how many new big stars?...all deserving) but was utterly bored by "The Pacific" (I don't know if there were any new household names associated with that one) and didn't get beyond episode three or four).
I've taken to watching "Only Angels Have Wings" ( a perfect movie in the way that Hawks could make a perfect movie...one in which you were THERE with THOSE GUYS) about four times a year. so there's always THAT one. and you're completely right about the best war movies being made by guys who'd seen actual WAR (Hawks, Wellman, Walsh...I know Henry King was a big flier, but I'm not sure if he was in the actual war...those guys could get you sweaty with excitement using MODELS and stock footage).
and inventing history for political correctness purposes strikes me as one of those "slippery slopes" everybody occasionally mentions. the very ugly truth is that our military was segregated at the time. I remember a few Korean War movies from the fifties and early sixties taking on racial issues very directly..."Home of the Brave" (from a play about antisemitism in the ranks) represented a laudable gesture, but it never could have happened (which everybody involved in making that movie were well aware of.
and since we're on movies, I must respectfully disagree with your choice of Trumbo as the best screenwriter of all time. Trumbo was good. but I gotta go with Ben Hecht. whenever I try to count how many movies have used the basic structure of "The Front Page," I always get lost doing it...there are TOO MANY (including, of course, "Gunga Din," one of the greatest acts of self-plagiarism since...again, I'm at a loss).
Hecht's good, but there is only one screenwriter who ever got it so right on the first draft that the movie was shot from it - that's Trumbo's "Lonely Are The Brave" my favorite Kirk Douglas movie (and his, too).
I must have seen it four or five times when it came out and then countless times on TV. I'd be afraid to watch it now because the death of someone's favorite animal is a little too close to home right now. but you're right...it's a fabulous script. the cops aren't even flaming assholes, although of course you don't want them to win. and actually, they don't. nobody wins.
the movie was greatly loved by everyone who ever saw it, but that was then. when I mention it to anybody under, say, 65, they've never heard of it.
something I discovered very recently about "received wisdom" relating to Hollywood is the stuff that's only been covered in Carl Rollyson's big new Faulkner bio. the accepted story is that Faulkner never really did much writing in Hollywood, but Hawks liked to drink and hunt with him. WRONG. Rollyson read everything Faulkner wrote in Hollywood, and he wrote a great deal and most of it was excellent. includes many intermediary versions of well-known movies that retained some of what he did but which were ultimately credited to someone else (including the aspect of "Mildred Pierce" that foregrounds Mildred's tremendous ambition)...you know about this aspect of the craft and what happens to the results of that craft before the movie comes out a whole lot better than I do. but discovering that Faulkner as a screenwriter was the real deal makes me very happy because he's my favorite writer after Shakespeare, who would certainly have been the best screenwriter of all. most critics nowadays consider "Antony and Cleopatra" to be a screenplay avant la lettre (and I'll complain yet again about the lack of italics in Substack)
That's why the Credits Award Process is so bound by the strictest rules of anything the WGA does. Nowadays, if the first writer on a script gets completely rewritten, he will still get at least a "Story by" credit if not a shared writing credit. And the rules for a later writer getting screen credit are very strict as to how much "change" had to be made to get credit (which is why there's this "big blank" in my Hollywood resume - I was doing rewrites at the time that didn't get a shared writing credit - they just got the credit of the producers knowing who made the thing work, and I got the credit my bank manager recognized - and if I was ever to say the names of those scripts, the WGA would still come after me with pitchforks and torches and ropes). Had Faulkner been writing in Hollywood from 1961 on, you would know what he really did. Ditto Raymond Chandler.
My (Aussie) Dad always said of the various war movies out of Hollywood, "You'd think John Wayne won the whole bloody thing on his own!" My Dad and Mum were both involved in the Coral Sea area during WWII.
John Wayne - Hollywood's #1 draft dodger during World War II - tried in 1943 to get a draft deferment on the grounds the war movies he was doing were a "critical industry contributing to the war effort." I met several guys from that time when I first got here, and nobody had a good word to say about "America's Biggest Hero."
You should get an appointment with Zazslav, get drunk beforehand, walk in and say "I'll be outside. I'm a lot drunker than you, shithead, so it'll be a fair fight."
oh! is Mr. Zaslav what my friends in Dublin refer to as "a whore for the piss?" I'd hardly be surprised...he has the boorish solipsism I recognize from my own days as one.
when I told the story of Zaslav getting Jack Warner's desk out of mothballs to my friend who's worked a lot for Disney, he said "you have to understand...that's all Hollywood is really about."
he (Danny, my pal) was the driving force behind "Newsies" (he taught Christian Bale to sing) and when the movie tanked, nobody at Disney would make eye contact with him for over a YEAR. he even noticed people seeing him and taking a different route to the coffee machine so they wouldn't have to say hello. and the only good thing in the movie was the musical turd he'd polished. he DID get the BEST freeze-frame credit at the end, however. but it's still not exactly JACK WARNER'S DESK.
does this mean that if I could get my hands on Faulkner's typewriter, I could write "Light in August?" I'd settle for WF's office at Warner Brothers and half the screenplay for "The Big Sleep."
David, that's not how it works. I gave a independent producer the treatment and hook for a movie and got nothing. He told me I signed away my credit. No, I told him, I signed a waiver for him paying me for what I gave him. I haven't talked with him in 20 years.
I will probably watch MOTA anyway and keep your critique in mind. Just remembering a generation that rose to history's challenges in the way they did touches my heart on the one hand and tears me up on the other as I look around and see what's making our history these days. Onetime US grit has turned to grift and graft.
Yeah, I am going to take away what stuff they do well, and enjoy that. I personally liked The Pacific, especially the battle sequences, which are stunning in their brutality and attention to detail. As for coherence, I seem to be a Philistine - I loath the end of "FURY" which is a travesty, but the art direction and set dressing of that picture are so good I tend to forget its flagrant fictions of fact (and even probability). The "Memphis Belle" movie's start-up and take-off sequence is one of the best I've seen - all done with just five B-17s., superb editing..... But the hordes of quasi-supersonic fighters zipping around in MOTA is a bit too much - some bright shining day they will learn to look at wartime news reels and gun camera film and go with that.
There's news you will also see silver B-17Fs, since the bean counters told them to save money by combining the work on the B-17Fs (in camo) and the later B-17Gs (not in camo).
Tom, as a point of education, how could they have done The Pacific better? They got stuck I think because they wanted to tell the story of the Pacific war but had a problem in that no Marine division participated in all the island campaigns -some divisions were rebuilding and training new troops while other divisions landed on the next island target. If they wanted to cover even just the most important campaigns, they'd have to use more than one Marine division. As it is, they had to miss Tarawa. Personally I thought many of the combat sequences in TP were the best I have ever seen, especially the airfield on Peleliu and Shuri ridge on Okinawa. It was of course episodic, and I personally didn't notice the division between Leckie's part and Sledge's. I guess I bought the premise that two guys who never met were representing different campaigns in the war. Just curious. And I worked out my motivation glitch for my project - thanks for the tip.
A story has to be unified. You don't tell two different stories in one story, unless there is a direct connection between the two.
Try this for The Pacific, adapting Robert Leckie's Helmet for my Pillow:
Ep 1 - Leckie joins the Marines, goes to Parris Island and we experience a WW2 Marine Boot Camp (Full Metal Jacket boot camp sequence on steroids). In process we meet the people we are going to the war with and learn why we like them.
Ep 2 - Leckie and friends go to the First Marine Division, where we see how poorly-equipped the Marines are with WW1 weapons, and more training. They get orders to go to New Zealand.
Ep 3 - they arrive in New Zealand and have to unload the ships themselves because of the dock workers strike. Almost as soon as they arrive, the Guadalcanal crisis begins.
Ep 4 - They then misload the ships for a combat landing and head for an unknown future. Episode ends with the landing on Guadalcanal; that night they witness the Battle of Savo Island - a terrifying "light show" and in the morning the Navy leaves. They're alone. Thank god for the Japanese rice.
Ep 5- Japanese bombing every day as Henderson Field is finished under fire. First patrols in a terrifying jungle. First fight - The Battle of the Tenaru.
Ep 6 - Battle of Edson's Ridge, aka "Bloody Ridge" - terrifying, hand-to-hand combat in the dark, fighting in small groups as the enemy pushes them back. Saved at dawn by the three Airacobras hitting the enemy.
Ep 7 - Constant rain brings a break. Things are close to the breaking point. They're ragged scarecrows. The enemy keeps landing. Admiral Halsey arrives and gives morale a shot of adrenaline.
Ep 8 - "The Bombardment" - shelled by the Japanese battleships in the most terrifying night of the campaign, everything reduced to rubble. The first Army unit arrives. Fight to hold the perimeter when General Vandegrift calls his commanders and decides that if they're defeated they will move into the jungle and fight as guerillas. They hold by the skin of their teeth.
Ep 9 - The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The Japanese stop coming. The Army arrives to relieve the Marines.
That would certainly do it. Thanks for answer - very informative. I'll watch MOTA and take away what I like and consign the rest to the mental trash bin where all my bad ideas go to die.....
Tom, you will love this, since you worked in Crazytown..... I have seen a thread on the MOTA FB page. The financial guy (Unit Production Manager) cut the budget for the CGI to convert the B-17F replicas to B-17G aircraft for the later parts of the series, so "MIKE" and other B-17Gs will appear as natural metal Fs..... The decision was made because the people in charge thought the detail changes were "trivial" and not worth the money. This is the sort of thing that even the best producers and directors have to deal with. May the fleas of a thousand camels.....
As an aside, the sad thing about the MOTA financial goof above is that will be talked about as why the series isn't as good as the previous WW2 series, and it completely ignores all the head-on attacks they show elsewhere that were the reason the chin turret was developed. The addition of the chin turret to the B-17G was an important and critical change, and I hope the reputation of the guy who shafted the work done to research it takes a hit. There is zero chance it can be fixed before the streaming date. I suppose in the overall scheme of things, the way Apple thinks about it, the majority of people watching won't notice the lack of a G chin turret, but the news from Lake Wobegon is that majority will be a lot smaller than they think - many people who will watch this series will be those interested in the air war in WW2 and they will know.....
That's always been Hollywood's answer to technical criticism: "You and ten others know that, and the 100,000 who paid to see it never knew a thing about it" which is how you get Douglas SBDs dive bombing Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor (among others).
Since my late first wife's uncle flew B-17s with the 15th AF in Italy, I really wanted this to be really good. Some of the CGI is actually quite good, but other shots are a bit obvious. I wish they had used real B-17s for the ground shots, but then there are almost no real B17Fs around that they could have used. I smelled modern political correctness with the Red Tails as well, though they appear in episode 8 of the 9, and largely because 332nd FG pilots were in Stalag Luft III along with US 8th AF guys. I am going to watch it - may retch here and there, but I;ll give it a go. Like you, I suspect there have been directions from the 'big wallets' about how the series is to be handled. The trailers have in fact left me dreading what may come.....some of the dialog is frankly not to be believed, certainly not when compared to the great movies of WW2 made in the 1940s-50s - some of the best military pictures ever made..... I'll take one for the team and watch the series, but I too expect some disappointment down the road.
I will say that CGI was the only way they were ever going to do something other than a flight. I suspect that with a bigger CGI budget, they could have done a better job in both rendering and presenting different situations - some of the combat loss footage did not convince me. But I doubt there was enough good quality color footage of the 100th BG to use original WW2 footage. Good CGI tends to disappear, because it is good enough you never notice it's there. I wish MOTA had this level if CGI quality but in too many scenes it does not. And yeah, the 'summer 1945' P-51s with the 5" rockets - bleh..... Hang in there.....
Thanks for the analysis. Fudge a little here, fudge a lot there, seems to be the norm these days, when the truthful account would serve as well, or better.
More than slightly off topic:
Since I have been coming here my FB feed has become packed with a steady stream of WWII aircraft of all descriptions (several P-38s just today), and some later jets that I have never heard of. You don't think that FB has been.....naw, they wouldn't do that.
They're sneaky bastards.
of course they would...and do. isn't that how they stay in business?
Just click on an ad for anything ANYWHERE, and see how fast Google and Facebook swing to the wretched task of filling your feed with ads for the same things you looked for, whether on eBay or any ad on the web - it is all tied together in the Great Internet Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Amazon does it, too, but in this case four friends have also seen this in their "Amazon recommends" - an ad for "The Frozen Chosen," still plugging along with sales good enough to show up in the author's royalty statement, eight years since original publication.
I too was hoping it would be like Band of Brothers.
So was I.
Thank you, TC. I hate wasting my time on bullshit when there’s so much good information finally available. Band of Brothers is good information.
Do you think the information’s gotten better since that moment the KGB files were open when the USSR fell?
Information got better when the files were opened in the 1990s - among other things, my good friend Royce Williams was able to prove he did indeed shoot down four MiG-15s on November 18, 1952, when the Russians provided their names in 1992; he eventually got a Navy Cross for it last year. Unfortunately, Putin then cut off the access in 2005, so we have what we have, but don't have what we could go look for before.
Thanks again.
jeez, Tom...I was so hoping they wouldn't screw the pooch, but you know the specifics of this stuff a lot better than I do.
I loved "Band of Brothers" (which created, like, how many new big stars?...all deserving) but was utterly bored by "The Pacific" (I don't know if there were any new household names associated with that one) and didn't get beyond episode three or four).
I've taken to watching "Only Angels Have Wings" ( a perfect movie in the way that Hawks could make a perfect movie...one in which you were THERE with THOSE GUYS) about four times a year. so there's always THAT one. and you're completely right about the best war movies being made by guys who'd seen actual WAR (Hawks, Wellman, Walsh...I know Henry King was a big flier, but I'm not sure if he was in the actual war...those guys could get you sweaty with excitement using MODELS and stock footage).
and inventing history for political correctness purposes strikes me as one of those "slippery slopes" everybody occasionally mentions. the very ugly truth is that our military was segregated at the time. I remember a few Korean War movies from the fifties and early sixties taking on racial issues very directly..."Home of the Brave" (from a play about antisemitism in the ranks) represented a laudable gesture, but it never could have happened (which everybody involved in making that movie were well aware of.
and since we're on movies, I must respectfully disagree with your choice of Trumbo as the best screenwriter of all time. Trumbo was good. but I gotta go with Ben Hecht. whenever I try to count how many movies have used the basic structure of "The Front Page," I always get lost doing it...there are TOO MANY (including, of course, "Gunga Din," one of the greatest acts of self-plagiarism since...again, I'm at a loss).
Hecht's good, but there is only one screenwriter who ever got it so right on the first draft that the movie was shot from it - that's Trumbo's "Lonely Are The Brave" my favorite Kirk Douglas movie (and his, too).
shit! it's mine too.
I must have seen it four or five times when it came out and then countless times on TV. I'd be afraid to watch it now because the death of someone's favorite animal is a little too close to home right now. but you're right...it's a fabulous script. the cops aren't even flaming assholes, although of course you don't want them to win. and actually, they don't. nobody wins.
the movie was greatly loved by everyone who ever saw it, but that was then. when I mention it to anybody under, say, 65, they've never heard of it.
something I discovered very recently about "received wisdom" relating to Hollywood is the stuff that's only been covered in Carl Rollyson's big new Faulkner bio. the accepted story is that Faulkner never really did much writing in Hollywood, but Hawks liked to drink and hunt with him. WRONG. Rollyson read everything Faulkner wrote in Hollywood, and he wrote a great deal and most of it was excellent. includes many intermediary versions of well-known movies that retained some of what he did but which were ultimately credited to someone else (including the aspect of "Mildred Pierce" that foregrounds Mildred's tremendous ambition)...you know about this aspect of the craft and what happens to the results of that craft before the movie comes out a whole lot better than I do. but discovering that Faulkner as a screenwriter was the real deal makes me very happy because he's my favorite writer after Shakespeare, who would certainly have been the best screenwriter of all. most critics nowadays consider "Antony and Cleopatra" to be a screenplay avant la lettre (and I'll complain yet again about the lack of italics in Substack)
That's why the Credits Award Process is so bound by the strictest rules of anything the WGA does. Nowadays, if the first writer on a script gets completely rewritten, he will still get at least a "Story by" credit if not a shared writing credit. And the rules for a later writer getting screen credit are very strict as to how much "change" had to be made to get credit (which is why there's this "big blank" in my Hollywood resume - I was doing rewrites at the time that didn't get a shared writing credit - they just got the credit of the producers knowing who made the thing work, and I got the credit my bank manager recognized - and if I was ever to say the names of those scripts, the WGA would still come after me with pitchforks and torches and ropes). Had Faulkner been writing in Hollywood from 1961 on, you would know what he really did. Ditto Raymond Chandler.
My (Aussie) Dad always said of the various war movies out of Hollywood, "You'd think John Wayne won the whole bloody thing on his own!" My Dad and Mum were both involved in the Coral Sea area during WWII.
John Wayne - Hollywood's #1 draft dodger during World War II - tried in 1943 to get a draft deferment on the grounds the war movies he was doing were a "critical industry contributing to the war effort." I met several guys from that time when I first got here, and nobody had a good word to say about "America's Biggest Hero."
You should get an appointment with Zazslav, get drunk beforehand, walk in and say "I'll be outside. I'm a lot drunker than you, shithead, so it'll be a fair fight."
I would love that! :-)
oh! is Mr. Zaslav what my friends in Dublin refer to as "a whore for the piss?" I'd hardly be surprised...he has the boorish solipsism I recognize from my own days as one.
when I told the story of Zaslav getting Jack Warner's desk out of mothballs to my friend who's worked a lot for Disney, he said "you have to understand...that's all Hollywood is really about."
he (Danny, my pal) was the driving force behind "Newsies" (he taught Christian Bale to sing) and when the movie tanked, nobody at Disney would make eye contact with him for over a YEAR. he even noticed people seeing him and taking a different route to the coffee machine so they wouldn't have to say hello. and the only good thing in the movie was the musical turd he'd polished. he DID get the BEST freeze-frame credit at the end, however. but it's still not exactly JACK WARNER'S DESK.
does this mean that if I could get my hands on Faulkner's typewriter, I could write "Light in August?" I'd settle for WF's office at Warner Brothers and half the screenplay for "The Big Sleep."
but that's NOT how it works.
David, that's not how it works. I gave a independent producer the treatment and hook for a movie and got nothing. He told me I signed away my credit. No, I told him, I signed a waiver for him paying me for what I gave him. I haven't talked with him in 20 years.
Another illustration of why some of us call the place "Okeefenokee West."
I will probably watch MOTA anyway and keep your critique in mind. Just remembering a generation that rose to history's challenges in the way they did touches my heart on the one hand and tears me up on the other as I look around and see what's making our history these days. Onetime US grit has turned to grift and graft.
Yeah, I am going to take away what stuff they do well, and enjoy that. I personally liked The Pacific, especially the battle sequences, which are stunning in their brutality and attention to detail. As for coherence, I seem to be a Philistine - I loath the end of "FURY" which is a travesty, but the art direction and set dressing of that picture are so good I tend to forget its flagrant fictions of fact (and even probability). The "Memphis Belle" movie's start-up and take-off sequence is one of the best I've seen - all done with just five B-17s., superb editing..... But the hordes of quasi-supersonic fighters zipping around in MOTA is a bit too much - some bright shining day they will learn to look at wartime news reels and gun camera film and go with that.
There's news you will also see silver B-17Fs, since the bean counters told them to save money by combining the work on the B-17Fs (in camo) and the later B-17Gs (not in camo).
Tom, as a point of education, how could they have done The Pacific better? They got stuck I think because they wanted to tell the story of the Pacific war but had a problem in that no Marine division participated in all the island campaigns -some divisions were rebuilding and training new troops while other divisions landed on the next island target. If they wanted to cover even just the most important campaigns, they'd have to use more than one Marine division. As it is, they had to miss Tarawa. Personally I thought many of the combat sequences in TP were the best I have ever seen, especially the airfield on Peleliu and Shuri ridge on Okinawa. It was of course episodic, and I personally didn't notice the division between Leckie's part and Sledge's. I guess I bought the premise that two guys who never met were representing different campaigns in the war. Just curious. And I worked out my motivation glitch for my project - thanks for the tip.
A story has to be unified. You don't tell two different stories in one story, unless there is a direct connection between the two.
Try this for The Pacific, adapting Robert Leckie's Helmet for my Pillow:
Ep 1 - Leckie joins the Marines, goes to Parris Island and we experience a WW2 Marine Boot Camp (Full Metal Jacket boot camp sequence on steroids). In process we meet the people we are going to the war with and learn why we like them.
Ep 2 - Leckie and friends go to the First Marine Division, where we see how poorly-equipped the Marines are with WW1 weapons, and more training. They get orders to go to New Zealand.
Ep 3 - they arrive in New Zealand and have to unload the ships themselves because of the dock workers strike. Almost as soon as they arrive, the Guadalcanal crisis begins.
Ep 4 - They then misload the ships for a combat landing and head for an unknown future. Episode ends with the landing on Guadalcanal; that night they witness the Battle of Savo Island - a terrifying "light show" and in the morning the Navy leaves. They're alone. Thank god for the Japanese rice.
Ep 5- Japanese bombing every day as Henderson Field is finished under fire. First patrols in a terrifying jungle. First fight - The Battle of the Tenaru.
Ep 6 - Battle of Edson's Ridge, aka "Bloody Ridge" - terrifying, hand-to-hand combat in the dark, fighting in small groups as the enemy pushes them back. Saved at dawn by the three Airacobras hitting the enemy.
Ep 7 - Constant rain brings a break. Things are close to the breaking point. They're ragged scarecrows. The enemy keeps landing. Admiral Halsey arrives and gives morale a shot of adrenaline.
Ep 8 - "The Bombardment" - shelled by the Japanese battleships in the most terrifying night of the campaign, everything reduced to rubble. The first Army unit arrives. Fight to hold the perimeter when General Vandegrift calls his commanders and decides that if they're defeated they will move into the jungle and fight as guerillas. They hold by the skin of their teeth.
Ep 9 - The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The Japanese stop coming. The Army arrives to relieve the Marines.
Ep10 - Arrival in Australia and recovery.
Would that grab your attention?
That would certainly do it. Thanks for answer - very informative. I'll watch MOTA and take away what I like and consign the rest to the mental trash bin where all my bad ideas go to die.....
Tom, you will love this, since you worked in Crazytown..... I have seen a thread on the MOTA FB page. The financial guy (Unit Production Manager) cut the budget for the CGI to convert the B-17F replicas to B-17G aircraft for the later parts of the series, so "MIKE" and other B-17Gs will appear as natural metal Fs..... The decision was made because the people in charge thought the detail changes were "trivial" and not worth the money. This is the sort of thing that even the best producers and directors have to deal with. May the fleas of a thousand camels.....
As an aside, the sad thing about the MOTA financial goof above is that will be talked about as why the series isn't as good as the previous WW2 series, and it completely ignores all the head-on attacks they show elsewhere that were the reason the chin turret was developed. The addition of the chin turret to the B-17G was an important and critical change, and I hope the reputation of the guy who shafted the work done to research it takes a hit. There is zero chance it can be fixed before the streaming date. I suppose in the overall scheme of things, the way Apple thinks about it, the majority of people watching won't notice the lack of a G chin turret, but the news from Lake Wobegon is that majority will be a lot smaller than they think - many people who will watch this series will be those interested in the air war in WW2 and they will know.....
That's always been Hollywood's answer to technical criticism: "You and ten others know that, and the 100,000 who paid to see it never knew a thing about it" which is how you get Douglas SBDs dive bombing Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor (among others).
Why is what you wrote today not surprising Tom?
Yeah, I wish it was.
Thank you for the heads up Tom. Your expertise is invaluable.
Thanks for your honest criticism.
What a disappointment!
Since my late first wife's uncle flew B-17s with the 15th AF in Italy, I really wanted this to be really good. Some of the CGI is actually quite good, but other shots are a bit obvious. I wish they had used real B-17s for the ground shots, but then there are almost no real B17Fs around that they could have used. I smelled modern political correctness with the Red Tails as well, though they appear in episode 8 of the 9, and largely because 332nd FG pilots were in Stalag Luft III along with US 8th AF guys. I am going to watch it - may retch here and there, but I;ll give it a go. Like you, I suspect there have been directions from the 'big wallets' about how the series is to be handled. The trailers have in fact left me dreading what may come.....some of the dialog is frankly not to be believed, certainly not when compared to the great movies of WW2 made in the 1940s-50s - some of the best military pictures ever made..... I'll take one for the team and watch the series, but I too expect some disappointment down the road.
I will say that CGI was the only way they were ever going to do something other than a flight. I suspect that with a bigger CGI budget, they could have done a better job in both rendering and presenting different situations - some of the combat loss footage did not convince me. But I doubt there was enough good quality color footage of the 100th BG to use original WW2 footage. Good CGI tends to disappear, because it is good enough you never notice it's there. I wish MOTA had this level if CGI quality but in too many scenes it does not. And yeah, the 'summer 1945' P-51s with the 5" rockets - bleh..... Hang in there.....