# Red Tails



## groph (Jan 22, 2012)

It's sort of under the radar, but Red Tails (loosely) follows the story of the Tuskeegee Airmen, an all Black flying unit in the USAAF in WWII. George Lucas was one of the guys who wrote it, and it's kind of shitty. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in it, though.

It kind of plays out like one of those old propaganda films and it has a bit of a drive-in theatre kind of character. Maybe that's just a nice way of saying that the acting is sort of bad, the dialogue was pretty cheesy, the story wasn't very tight - I think they tried to pack too much into it and they never got to go into much detail about anything.

The racism the unit would have experienced was basically portrayed as a few white guys taking a few cheap cracks at the black guys, one gets called a ...... once, but they could have told that part of the story a lot better since we're talking about a segregated fighting unit here. Although if it went all American History X on us then the rating would have been a bit higher and the movie wouldn't be kid-friendly at all. Because the horrific violence of WWII is totally fine for 10 year olds to watch, but I digress.

The combat scenes are mostly implausible. The bombers the Tuskeegee Airmen (the "Red Tails") were protecting were flying in ridiculously tight formations, there were fighters literally weaving in and out of them like nothing, there are a few questionable maneuvers made, the planes had unlimited ammo, there were shitloads of inaccuracies regarding the markings of the enemy aircraft (this is mostly trivial, I'm just an airplane nerd so I know). Basically if you've seen Flyboys, the combat in Red Tails is very very similar so you'll know what to expect. Pretty much another romanticized war movie that I'm starting to get a bit sick of. 

Still, it's generally a fun movie, pretty fast paced and if you have a 10 year old boy to take it to, he'd probably love it.


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## Sicarius (Jan 22, 2012)

USAAC*

but It's a script that started 20 years ago, and the remaining Tuskeegee Airmen helped with the movie, so cheese is gonna be in there. Neyo is cast in it lol.

Some of the maneuvers used in the trailers I saw were actually pretty accurate to old war footage I've seen of P-51s against the ME-262s back in this time frame. 

I've wanted to see this for a while, and I'm sure my "plane nerd" side is going to have a nice time seeing the ME-262 finally in a WW2 movie.


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## groph (Jan 22, 2012)

Sicarius said:


> USAAC*
> 
> but It's a script that started 20 years ago, and the remaining Tuskeegee Airmen helped with the movie, so cheese is gonna be in there. Neyo is cast in it lol.
> 
> ...



USAAC indeed, you're right. Fuck, I should have been a writer for this movie since the attention to detail was pretty bad.

It is cool seeing the 262, they out-badass anything else in the sky. It's especially hilarious since the German pilots are portrayed as evil villains so they're basically nasty little henchmen flying around in the air with their thin moustaches and monocles (not really).

Ne-Yo's character was hilarious, he was the only character I really liked in the movie. 

BUT, to split hairs, here are some inaccuracies/shit that made no sense:

- The airmen also flew the P-47 and the P-39 briefly but of course the P-51 gets all the attention
- A yellow nose on a Luftwaffe aircraft in WWII does not denote the flight leader, that marking is on the fuselage. A yellow nose means that the aircraft is serving on the Eastern Front in Russia, although during the Battle of Britain some Luftwaffe aircraft had yellow markings. Generally, white markings = North Africa, yellow = Russia, and other colors like red or blue = homeland defense - this would have been more appropriate for this movie.
- Half of the German aircraft are painted with a whitewash which was only used in the Russian campaign
- Almost none of the German aircraft are painted in the standard fighter paint scheme. There were shitloads of different schemes but there was literally no consistency in the aircraft in this movie.
- Where the fuck were the Fw-190s? The Focke-Wulfs were the aircraft that did the dirty work of shooting down bombers since they were ridiculously heavily armed. A 109 could take out a bomber, but they were more of a dogfighter, and also for the most part outclassed by the 190. Germany just happened to build 30,000 109's though.
- An Me-262 would never have had a yellow nose
- The main antagonist from the film, "Pretty Boy," our uber-Aryan ultra Nazi evil villain has the emblem of the 3rd SS Panzer Division painted on his plane. Panzer = Tank This division was, however, composed of evil villains as they were concentration camp guards.
- there was hardly any radio chatter during the combat scenes. The bomber crews would have been *shitting their pants* when under attack by German planes and all hell would be breaking loose over the radio. Instead, it's more like "Oh bother, we're under attack. We're losing power in engine 3, time to go back to base. Also, I hate black people."
- Later Bf-109s did not have wing mounted guns - all of the armament was in the nose. Some variants carried guns under the wings in gondolas and they make an appearance in the film, but in some scenes it looks like the guns are mounted in the wings.
- Nobody fires in bursts. Pretty sure the standard procedure in air combat back then was to wait until your target is filling your gunsight, and then you let off a half second or one second burst because you do, in fact, have limited ammo.
- About the ammo, the MK108 30mm cannons the Me-262 is armed with - pretty sure those only have something like 30 or 40 rounds per gun. Not a hell of a lot of ammo. Also, cannons fire shells which explode, this is the difference between a cannon and a machine gun. When Smokey (Ne-Yo) gets a few hits from an Me-262, in reality his plane would have gotten it's shit ruined. It only takes a single cannon shell to knock out a fighter-sized plane if you get hit in the engine. A hit in the wing would probably open up a foot wide hole and at the speed they're going at, rip off the wing. He gets hit in the wing like 2 or 3 times.
- How the fuck does a P-51 knock out a destroyer? It's like the ship's crew dragged everything explosive on the ship out of storage and onto deck. They did not live to regret this decision.
- In the beginning of the movie, they pick off insignificant ground targets. The problem is that they barely identify them - for all they knew they could have been strafing some French guy taking his truck out for a spin.
- Nobody gives a shit when someone dies
- You don't marry a woman who doesn't speak your language. I don't care how much of a smokeshow she is.


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## Xaios (Jan 23, 2012)

Honestly, I saw a preview for the movie and it looked like WWII as told by Tyler Perry.


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## Mexi (Jan 23, 2012)

^ yeah pretty much. the dialogue seemed so contrived, I don't think I could sit through it all if the previews are any indication. I figured the role of the Tuskegee airmen was already adressed in film with the movie The Tuskegee Airmen back in '95 
The Tuskegee Airmen (TV 1995) - IMDb

at least that one had Lawrence Fishburne and John Lithgow


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