Top 10 Movie 'Dog Fights' of all time ...

[Mark Allen M]

... according to this video anyway.

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/watch-the-top ... 1700507543

Anyone seen the movie "Against the Sun"? A bit of TBD CGI ...
I think we talked about it in another thread a while back.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2557276/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[Jerry O'Neill]

I can agree on only about half of these. Besides, I question a list of the "greatest dogfights on film" that includes "Memphis Belle". That's an air Battle, not a dogfight. Dogfight is between two or more fighter aircraft. Also, they don't include "The Blue Max", but they do include space films and the heavy in CGI "The Red Baron". Come on! You can do better than this list!
My two cents.
Jerry

[shrike]

I do agree with their #1. The plot may be thin enough to see through even without the subtitles, but the Air to Air stuff is spectacular, and 95% practical

[CAPFlyer]

Sorry Jerry, but they do include the Blue Max. It didn't make the numbered list, but it was mentioned in their list of ones considered for (I think) the spot that Great Waldo Pepper took.

Also, while they call it a "Top 10" I don't think it's in any particular order since they seem to be doing genre and "style" as much as doing overall "best". I do love that they make passing mention of "Pearl Harbor" and then make a point to emphasize how "Tora! Tora! Tora!" is lightyears better.

It was also interesting seeing how many of the movies on the list used the original Tora! aircraft or footage in them (Midway, Final Countdown, Pearl Harbor, etc). I knew how influential it was , but this list just shows how it influenced non-aviation types.

[seagull61785]

I'm not sure how this can be a 'Top Ten' without including the Battle of Britain and the original Hells Angels.

Neither of which resorted to CGI. And HOW many stunt pilots and/or actors came to grief in the making of Hells Angels?

Disappointed.

Barry

[Mark Allen M]

Come on! You can do better than this list!
My two cents.
Jerry

Of course I'm sure I could do better, but as I stated, "... according to this video anyway." This top 10 I'm assuming is according to whomever put it together who perhaps doesn't know as much as 'we' know about this stuff. Gotta give a little credit for effort. It's an interesting list yet far from realistic, but so what! It's just someone else's time being used to do something.

Lets see your top 10.

BTW FWIW I'm not sure I could put together a top 10 list. I'd have to go way back to even consider one. My list would be void of all CGI and silly props. Can't think of too many off hand other than BOB and Tora. But that's just me. I do really like a few of the Japanese CGI films. Very well done and knowing it's all CGI very convincing CGI I must say.

[Jerry O'Neill]

CAPFlyer, I was just referring to the list of the top ten, too many missing in a ranked list to take it seriously.

[bdk]

Star Wars????!!!

[Mark Allen M]

Several Star Wars air battle scenes were fashioned, copied, mimicked what-have-you from old WW2 dogfight films apparently.

[CoastieJohn]

I'm not sure this would qualify as a dogfight per se, but some of the airborne scenes in 12 O'Clock High were pretty good IMO. I watched that movie quite a few times and always get a little tensed up.

[TheBigBadGman]

There was a famous director - I forget his name - that once claimed that it was impossible to make a war film that did not glorify war; not in the political sense but in the visual sense. Human beings find confrontation exciting; if this was not the case, there would not be such a thing as "action" films.

And, despite even the noblest of efforts, that stigma is hard to get rid off. Saving Private Ryan did more for WWII films than any other on that same subject beforehand, but what have we had since then? It seems too many have walked away with the wrong lessons: many a war film since then has had desaturated colors, young protagonists, and gory combat sequences, but few have made war as unattractive.

Now, I said all that to say this - what can we really expect in terms of a truly accurate portrayal of air combat?

Saving Private Ryan and its HBO spinoffs are now considered benchmarks in film portrayals of modern infantry combat. Das Boot has yet to find an equal in its portrayal of naval warfare (at least, below the water), and Fury did, in my opinion, an admirable job in dismantling the mystique of armored warfare. Considering how old and how expensive warbirds are becoming (and only getting more-so with age), I seriously doubt we will ever see a big-budget portrayal of air combat again that does not use CGI. And we all know that there has never been a CGI animation that has ever looked like a real airplane, much less move like one. I did some CGI modelling in college - they don't animate control surfaces as that takes up valuable memory and render time. Heck, animators only build one half of a model at a time, then mirror image it for the other side. I recall a Steven Spielberg series that came out on Sci-Fi a few years back that opened with UFOs entering a B-17 combat box. The behind-the-scenes featurettes claimed that this series would be the aviation equivalent of Saving Private Ryan. Well, some shots were impressive but... both sides of the B-17s were identical (what, no exit door?), the planes were flying at what looked like 800 mph one foot a part from each other, no one wore oxygen masks until bandits showed up, and the gunners downed ever single fighter than came their way.

The sad thing is, this little bit from the first episode of the Taken series still looks better than either Pearl Harbor or Red Tails.

When I give lectures on air power I tend to show a clip or two from Memphis Belle (1990). Now, I know that for most warbird nuts, this is sacrilegious. Well, this is how I look at it: Twelve O'Clock High and Command Decision (my preference) are both great movies, but they are not about combat, they are about command; in fact, their combat sequences simply employ wartime footage, glaringly jumping from clips of varying quality without any context as to how they intertwine (they don't!). The films of the 60s and 70s were better about using real aircraft, but they are not without issues. Battle of Britain and Tora, Tora, Tora can at times be painfully slow and repetitive, and the non-chalant attitude of the actors, combined with the cheapness of the sets and stunts, does little to make air combat seem threatening. Memphis Belle is by no means perfect, but it is a bit more gritty than its predecessors and - this is the important part - it is probably the last decent aviation film to use real aircraft.

Having said all that, I can't take much issue with this list. They were trying to pick an example to fit each genre, and while I can't say I've seen them all, many of their choices are sound to me. So they picked Wings over Hell's Angles? I can live with that. As for Star Wars, who didn't want to be an X-Wing pilot growing up? Prior to that, space films tended to show combat akin to the old naval broadsides.

Listening to combat audio recordings, realistic air combat would probably not sell to the general public. Airmen are trained to keep their voices down (almost monotone at times) and combat - be it fighter or bomber - is in reality a team effort rather than a individualist free-for-all. And, worst yet, air combat is probably the single most attractive form of combat there is. Think about it: there wouldn't be a warbird community if there wasn't something attractive about machines whose sole purpose is to kill people.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble on so. People tend to learn their history through movies (*sigh*) so I sometimes feel like we have to make the best of a bad lot. How do make something so sexy look scary? I can't answer that. As far as I can remember, Apocalypse Now had the only air combat scene I can recall that looked genuinely threatening. And while there were no combat sequences, Catch-22 was an incredibly gritty portrayal of WWII aviation, even if somewhat stylized.

[p51]

I know it was a very, VERY poorly written and acted movie, but I always thought the end dogfight between helicopters in "Firebirds" was very well edited and photographed. When the Dabney Coleman-looking bad guy get schwacked, it's some of the better model work I've seen in a movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyuULnLsc4w
The ending dogfight in "Blue Thunder" wasn't half bad, either.

There was a famous director - I forget his name - that once claimed that it was impossible to make a war film that did not glorify war; not in the political sense but in the visual sense. Human beings find confrontation exciting; if this was not the case, there would not be such a thing as "action" films.

I don't know, I think Richard Attenborough did a very good job showing the futility of war in "A Bridge Too Far"...

[maxum96]

Not really a dogfight per se, but the chase scene between the Hughes 369HS (500C) and a Aérospatiale Alouette in Fatal Encounter starring Larry Hagman was pretty impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_I2EmDuc-c

[Yak3]

Dogfight footage, a great deal of the footage from Battle of Britain is truly superb and sets a bench-mark that CGI simply cannot come close.

General footage, for me it has to be Empire of the Sun. The Mustang attack sequence is spectacular.

[maxum96]

General footage, for me it has to be Empire of the Sun. The Mustang attack sequence is spectacular.

It was pretty spectacular. But did you know some of it was done with R/C models?

Here's a blog from one of the pilots involved, the late Mark Hanna

http://vintageaeroplanewriter.blogspot.com/2011/12/skip-bombing-p-51s-in-empire-of-sun.html