Just a bit of a warning for everybody who is waiting for it to stream: Enjoy the movie while it is happening, but for God’s sake don’t think about it after you get home. I formulated a good half-dozen better attack plans in the shower this morning than the one they followed in the movie. I also have a couple of questions/comments:
Why 2:30? Was it ever stated why they were under such a tight attack schedule? Was that how long it would take the Death Star to clear Endor?
It was obvious to me that Maverick didn’t eject at Mach 10. After everything went pear-shaped he would have spent several minutes trying to reset and restart. It’s not like he pranged the airframe, and he was well into near-space. He just lost all systems. That gives plenty of time for the plane to drop to sub-mach speed for a safe ejection. The more important question is where did the sucker crash? You’d think S&R would have found him well before he could hike into a nearby town.
Why did Maverick bother to punt out flares against the initial attack of the last Su57? It was attacking head-on. No way an infrared tracking system would get a lock on the Tomcat from that angle.
I swear, a panel of 12 years olds could have come up with a better attack plan, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as exciting or dramatic. The price you pay for a really good popcorn movie.
Well of course not. You might as well tell people not to think too deeply about “the life of Brian” or “Mary Poppins”. There is no need to think, that’s not what it was created for.
Enjoy the ride, and what a ride. Entertainment for entertainment’s sake is a perfectly laudable goal and sadly too rare recently.
Total agreement there. I enjoyed the movie a lot more than I expected to. A lot. You just have to approach it like any Michael Bay movie. Watch the pretty explosions and shut up and eat your popcorn.
That was how long it would take for the enemy jets to reach the good guys. The attack started with them launching missiles at the nearby airfield, so once that happened, it was no longer a secret.
But that makes no sense (of course). The cruise missiles take out the airbase, so everyone is alert. But they blew up the airbase. Where are these Su57s coming from then? If they were already airborne, where are they? The suckers can’t just hover. They could be right over the valley or a hundred klicks away.
In the movie, they were on long range patrol. “two bandits in the northeast” “where the hell did they come from?” “long range patrol I guess” or something like that. But as far as the military was concerned, during planning, the assumption was that the first strike wouldn’t wipe out the entire airfield and some fighters would still take off. Maverick said so explicitly during training, as I recall it was to the effect of: “and then you’ll have to contend with any planes that the tomahawks missed”
I remember that. But of course, with the runway shot to shit it doesn’t matter how many fighters were left. They would have no way of taking off. Any fighters from that base would have to be on the threshold in full War Alert to get off the ground and over the valley in that amount of time. Eh, small quibble about added drama.
Taxiway. A very short taxiway that made the backseater very nervous.
The other question that popped into my head on the drive home was why the hell did the pilot of Su57 #2 follow Mav into the canyons on the way out? Why didn’t he just pop up to 3000’ or so, follow the F-14 out of the canyon, then drop him with a long range shot from above? Zero reason to chase him directly.
The pilot was amazed that a 40-year old plane was not only still functional despite no source of replacement parts, but that it was sitting in the hangar fully serviced and fueled. Given the total nonsensical experience of seeing this plane in flight, the pilot was unable to make rational decisions.
That pretty much describes the combat school scenes in the entire first movie. Why are you following at 20 feet back, trying to get a missile lock, (and not using the gun!), when you can back off miles and make a missile shot?
That is pretty much the only similarity and the continuous nitpicking seems unproductive. The only answers you are going to get are “because the film says so”
I don’t understand the people who are constantly going THOSE ARE F-14S ITS CLEARLY IRAN THAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE THE ROGUE NATION!!! when they’re not even the actual original model F-14s Iran had, and we’ve already established in this universe the MiG-28 was the most fearsome aircraft of the 80s. Clearly this is a universe where we were giving out F-14s like we were giving out F-15s, to EVERYONE. So an F-14D being in someone’s aircraft inventory as a combat ready fighter isn’t that farfetched.
Now THAT reminds me of Tom Cruise in Taps, at the end, when everybody else is standing down peacefully but he isn’t ready to drop his rifle, and then he empties the 50 cal onto the school campus while shouting, “It’s beautiful, man. It’s beautiful!”
It starts here and goes for about two minutes until the shooting stops.
