Category: A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words: Iron Eagle

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words2 Comments

Iron Eagle

Time for a nostalgia piece from my past. I watched Iron Eagle a lot on DVD when I was younger. It is an amazingly stupid and stupidly amazing action aviation movie that is incredibly 1980s.

So, a fighter pilot is shot down over “Libya” and his son, with the aid of a fellow pilot, “acquires” a pair of F-16s to rescue him, causing a massive number of explosions in the process. Because the actual US Air Force was not exactly keen on sponsoring a movie where kids can steal F-16s, the filming was in Israel, with Kfirs playing the role of “MiG-23s.”

The movie’s gotten a lot of understandable comparisons to Top Gun which I think are off-base, and not just because Iron Eagle was actually released before it. Top Gun is a very “Tom Clancy” movie, an idealized story that still has a fig leaf of grounding. Iron Eagle is a very “Mack Maloney” movie, something that just goes “Prepare film for ludicrous speed” and never looks back.

So yeah, there’s a lot of explosions, an F-16 that never runs out of ammunition, an F-16 that lands on a convenient runway in the film’s climax, a water treatment plant that stands in for an oil refinery, the politics you’d expect from an 80s action film, buildings exploding after getting hit with individual Vulcan rounds, a convenient in-universe excuse to play the (excellent) soundtrack at every opportunity, and so much more.

There’s a reason why I watched it so much, and it’s not because the acting was Oscar-worthy. This movie is classic ridiculous 80s fun.

A Thousand Words: Dr. Strangelove

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, Review1 Comment

Dr. Strangelove

Welcome to A Thousand Words, my attempt to expand Fuldapocalypse into visual media. Since this is a blog that’s technically about World War III, I figured I’d open it up by reviewing the movie that probably, more than any other, represents World War III in popular culture. This movie, obviously, is the Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers classic Dr. Strangelove.

The movie itself is excellent. I could complain about how some of the humor seems a little forced at times, but the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. It’s a classic for a reason.

What I find more intriguing is how utterly different Dr. Strangelove is from, say, Red Storm Rising. The entire plot centers around nuclear war, as opposed to the sidestepping most of the “WW3s” I knew did. It’s started by an American general, and there are only a few characters. Granted, some of this is the movie format at work, but still.