Common Sense Note
Parents should know that the movie features lots of fighter jet action, explosions, drinking (martinis, beer), smoking, tough fighter language, and sexual references, sometimes raunchy (ménage a trois).
Families who see the film can discuss the gendered differences between attitudes toward war (the girl pilot is more emphatically moralistic and humanistic than the boys). Also worth considering is the film's framing of war as a series of choices, and how technology can enhance, exacerbate, and (ideally) alleviate human costs. How is the robot pilot's disobedience singular or systemic? How does the film produce viewer pleasure in the battle images, but also ask you to consider the victimization of farmers and other civilians?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Full of explosions and video game-like fighter jet scenes, STEALTH poses a serious problem beneath its giddy surface. That is, does the escalation of war by technological advances lead to more or fewer human costs? (Yes, it's a question that Star Trek posed long ago).
The movie sets off three excellent Talon pilots -- Kara (Jessica Biel), Henry (Jamie Foxx), and Ben (Josh Lucas) -- against their new "wingman," the UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) nicknamed EDI (pronounced "Eddie"), a newfangled robotic fighter jet whose family tree includes WarGames, 2001's HAL, and Terminator's Skynet.
Touted by Captain Cummings (Sam Shepard) as "the future of digital warfare," EDI is all blinking lights ("EDI's thinking!") and silky vocals (again, think HAL, here voiced by Wentworth Miller). Once he's struck by lightning, though, EDI goes off grid, and begins seeking out all sorts of targets, even those designated "hypothetical," thus threatening to star a world war.
Ben and Cummings discuss the uses of robot weapons, Cummings believing that they will reduce "body bags," while Ben (like Kara) thinks the human element of piloting is crucial: "We have instincts and feelings and moral judgments," he protests, even as Cummings commands him to recover EDI, without destroying it.
Unfortunately, during their search for EDI, the three pilots are separated, which makes for some ungainly splitting and multiplying of action-strands. Kara ends up having to eject over North Korea and before you can say "Owen Wilson," she's scampering all over mountaintops and dark plains, trying to avoid instantly assembled heavy firepower (led by a recurrent, malicious-looking Korean in uniform, who makes it his personal mission to glower at every turn of her escape tactics).
The action bits are predictably well-choreographed and boisterous, but also distracting (yes, even in an action movie, too much of a good thing is still too much). STEALTH wants to be a smarter movie than it is, posing the cases for and against technological warfare, tracing foibles not only of individuals within the financing and command systems, but also in the systems themselves. A self-declared post-9/11 action movie, it's mightily conflicted, exhilarating in the visuals and visceral effects, but stubbornly clinging a core idea, that war is actually bad -- for everyone.
Families who enjoy this movie might also see others about technology out of control, including WarGames, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, I, Robot, and especially 2001. The Right Stuff reveals a context for casting Sam Shepard, Top Gun, Wings (1927), and Hell's Angels (1930) focus on gutsy pilots, and director Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious and xXx show his continuing interest in what might be termed "vehicular heroism."
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSome references and language. |
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ViolenceLots of explosions, video-gamey and mostly from the air, so bodies fall away and catch on fire, mostly anonymously. |
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LanguageAction-heroic posturing and cursing. |
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Social BehaviorDiscussions of being good pilots, some deception and disobedience. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking and smoking. |
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