So, I recently finished reading the book “Flight of the Intruder” by Stephen Coonts, and I gotta say, I loved this book, and I’m amazed the movie did as good a job as it did following it accurately (despite the usuall mix of combining or eliminating extraneous plotlines, combining or switching around characters, etc.)
I’m also a huge fan of the movie (Tiger Cole is probably my favorite Wilem Dafoe role outside of Agent Paul Smecker).
Anyone else happen to be a fan of the book and/or movie? Or an anti-fan, as the case may be? Common, let’s kick up a discussion here.
A great war movie.
Unfortunately it has it moral screwed up big time.
So your partner is dead? That doesn’t gie you the excuse to blow up Saigon.-
Besides. An this is the problem with every Vietnam movie: we are supposed to care for the bad guys
Aside from that nitpick. And excelent film. Dafoe is great in it.
Yeah, in the book they make a big point of what a bad idea that was (in the book, Cool Hand and Tiger try to bomb Communist Party Headquarters in Saigon, but miss, managing to blow the crap out of an empty city street and break some windows in the middle of the night) and then a sizeable portion of the book is spent on a plotline of Jake trying to hide what he did, and then having to deal with the consequences, being saved only by circumstances. It’s implied that a fair amount of time passes between the investigation of his raid and the mission in the end where he and Tiger get shot down (according to Stephen Coonts, the mission at the end of the book and the Saigon raid itself were the only sorties he made up for the book, everything else supposedly happened to him or to someone he knew).
After reading the book, I kinda wish they had kept the character of Frank Allen in it. He’s an Air Force pilot who flies Sandies, and a friend of the squadron XO (Both of them going to UT, the one in Austin, not the one in Nashville). His character gets folded into the characters of Commander Camparelli and Tiger Cole in the movie, mostly in the last mission (he only shows up twice in the book, but he was rather likeable).
Also, I would have liked it if they could have kept the elaborate chain of practical jokes amongst the squadron pilots. That was some hillarious stuff.
A coulpe of words (working from foggy book-only memory): their target in in Hanoi, not Saigon. And I thought it was the National Assembly, not Party HQ…
Party HQ in Saigon wouldn’t make any sense until the war was over, FWIW.
:smack: Yeah, I suck at Geography. I used to think College Station was located between Fort Worth and El Paso. Later found out that was actually the city of Abillene I was thinking of. :rolleyes:
But yeah, the book made a bigger deal of how badly Jake had screwed up by going on that mission than the movie did.
One thing I did like about the book (and to a lesser degree, the movie) was the recurring theme of anti-aircraft fire vs. attack planes. In the beginning of the book, they use sophisticated technology to ward off anti-aircraft fire by jamming their radar, only to suffer a “golden BB” shot from a flintlock rifle fired blindly into the air. Later on, they go on a mission speficially to attack the anti-aircraft missile launchers with specially designed electronics and missiles, and the entire last portion of the book has the entire squadron going on missions just to attack anti-aircraft positions. After they get shot down, Jake and Tiger are stuck on the ground while an Air Force squadron flying out of Thailand also dukes it out with anti-aircraft guns, after one of the Air Force planes is shot down while trying to cover a rescue chopper. The book makes it plainly clear that the continuing existince and threat of anti-aircraft weaponry is a constant factor in these pilots’ lives, even after they are shot down.
Something else that struck me is we only see two Air Force pilots in the book, one of them is presented as an antagonist to Jake, the retired F-86 pilot who is now a war correspondant, and the other as a protaganist, the A-1D Sandy pilot who is shot down while actively protecting Jake. Dunno if Stephen Coonts had any intentions behind this, but I thought it was kinda neat.
