Waste of time

Redundant and unnecessary.

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It didn't even take 10 wasted minutes of my life to discover this hideous excuse for a film is less entertaining than watching paint dry. Perhaps to a totally stoned 4th grader it would be marginally interesting but then so would a trail of ants on the floor. No part of this debacle is even close to real or realistic. But I sure would like to get some of those binoculars that let people watch every part of an intercontinental air race. It never ceases to amaze me that movie makers who want to have airplanes in their film only rarely manage to dig up an actual pilot, or engineer or SOMEONE who isn't a total doofus, for technical advise. Another hard to believe fact is that they have the nerve to charge admission to crap like this. Boo, hiss.

The plot, special effects, and any similarity to current day USAF capabilities & operations was so far off-base that I didn't even notice the poor editing job that they previous reviewer mentioned.I only suffered through the first half-hour of the movie before I had to put myself out of my misery & turn off the TV.Clearly this was a low-budget movie, and not only did the USAF/DOD run away from any agreement to provide a liaison for basic technical accuracy, but the producer apparently didn't bother to have ANY adviser for military 'culture' or aviation matters.They couldn't even track down some surplus fighter pilot helmets & oxygen mask assemblies -- what they depicted as O2 masks were actually some modified SCUBA diver breathing regulators!

I normally wouldn't waste my time writing comments on drivel like this but it just makes one wonder; who watches a movie like this and gives it a *10*? It truly boggles the mind when one sees that out of 60-some voters, 14 of them voted this carcass a 10 out of 10! It was a B-movie. I can understand where some might consider it to have B-movie charm. But even at that; it might rate a 6 or a 7 at most. Does this movie REALLY, in ANYONE'S view, deserve to be rated alongside the greatest movies of all time? Does even someone who enjoyed the campy eye-candy (which was there in a couple of scenes) consider this to be deserving of being as good as film-making gets? So I'm ranting. I can only say that such a rant is the BEST commentary this film ever deserves. If anyone wants to know how this film rates; then someone utterly aghast over more than 1 out of every 5 people rating this film a *10/10* speaks volumes about it's quality (or utter lack thereof).

(2008 edit: Try to keep in mind, while reading, that I was 16 when I wrote this.)I don't even know where to start. They slapped an F-16 Fighting Falcon patch on the guy's jacket, and yet an F-16 was never even shown in the flick. Of course, all the fake jets they used tried to *look* like F-16s - if they didn't have two engines. The oxygen masks they used looked like gas masks. Not only is the air THIN up there... it's TOXIC too! Wow, how futuristic. It's also impossible to fly they way they were. Ugh... wow, this movie is a black hole, a straw, a pump, a jet INTAKE, or (insert name of something that sucks worse here).That's not even talking about the horrid job they did with the audio and the "Infomercial" audience who, during one scene, mysteriously broke into astounding applause for no apparent reason. The slo-mo was there, the music was there... but why? Where's the situation?Speaking of slo-mo... uh... mind telling me WHY there was so much slo-mo? It's like "Woow, dude, this guy's, like... flying...".They also left the script hanging like a bunch of loose threads. During the second air refueling scene in the storm, they completely left out how the REST of the refuelings went. One went bad, they made a big deal over that, and never told us how the rest went. Last time I checked, they were running out of fuel with no other options, and...uh... so how did the rest get fuel? *sigh*I just can't stop thinking about why they bought that F-16 patch off eBay and yet never even used an F-16. Heck, they never even MENTIONED F-16s to give them credit in this movie. Also, there was another real-life fighter (what, an F-15 or F-18?) on the front cover... yet... not in the movie. All fake, computer-generated jets. I bet the writers went to, like, a Russian air force base, saw the "For Rent!" signs in the windows of the fighters, and said "Wow, a script idea!" :-)Then... oh jeez... that little part with the knocked-out pilot. Somehow or another, there's a Matrix-like vitals monitor (which use PUMPS as visuals for breathing...) - as if this were VR or something, and it says "Oh Man! This Dude's Dying!". They "dock" this jet inside the refueling plane, pull out the pilot, and do all this stuff to him, including sticking him, like a sword, with a gigantic syringe or something ("HEE-YA!"). That whole scene lost me. Oh well, onward.The ending? 4 pilots are already dead. Two are left to battle it out, and one of them goes down (not the hero of the movie, noooo). The hero of the movie thinks "oh no i couldn't possibly win this because my only competition's engine blew up! NOOO! I have GOT to eject a perfectly good plane, forfeit 25 MILLION bucks, and save one of the 5 pilots who went down! WOO!".... What were these writers thinking?! *sigh*This movie is my new official "Bad" benchmark.Well, gotta give the writers and director kudos for effort... *heh*