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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.
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