old iron wrote:
Jerry O'Neill said"
Quote:
It was not produced to be a documentary, it was produced to entertain and make money, period.
We history nitpickers are a small minority and not the target that they worry about.
I have to agree with this. The air attacks were totally wrong - the planes much too concentrated and the effectively of the anti-aircraft fire much too effective (only one dive-bomber was shot down by a Japanese ship that day, according to Tully's
Shattered Sword) - but we should allow the filmmakers some poetic license.
I thought the concentration on the two squadrons on Enterprise was a good decision, as this allowed at least some character development. The lack of F4Fs can be forgiven as those were elsewhere. Dick Best was probably the key roll in the movie, and I thought that correct as well.
I did go see it last night. Y'all pretty much covered it. The storyline went pretty well I thought, while the flying was obviously off, BUT thinking about if from a cinematic point of view, they were trying to portray the danger and ferocity of the action, so I can see why they made various choices. I think some of the "weird" flying angles could be explained by camera movement (not all of it, obviously, like a lot of the "formation" turns) but more importantly I think that a more realistic look would have really, really tiny airplanes diving from much higher altitude and they were using creative license on purpose. Other little things did bother me - like how hard would it be to CGI the B-25B vs a J model, lol, but I guess the one word that struck me after I finished watching, was that the film for the most part was very respectful of the actual story, and I appreciated that.
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