THE BLUE ANGELS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Blue Angels, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 22, 2024

No can deny that the sight of four fighter jets flying inches apart at 400 miles per hour is beyond impressive. Members of the Blue Angels, an exclusive squadron of the United States Navy, pull off this astonishing feat, as well as several others, multiple times a year at public events across the country, and in its most incredible moments, The Blue Angels puts us inside the cockpits of those jets.

The main selling point of Paul Crowder's documentary, then, is the spectacle, and when the movie focuses on that element, it delivers. Of course, a Blue Angels demonstration is a relatively short affair that wouldn't make for a feature-length movie, so Crowder also has the task of surrounding these aerial feats of derring-do with more. In that regard, the movie is far less compelling in scattershot approach.

It probably doesn't help that the filmmaker shows us everything we would want to see during the opening credits. It's a montage of pilots with the Blue Angels soaring and rolling and turning upside in the sky, and yes, the shots are thrilling, because we're about as close as anyone who's not a part of this elite group could possibly get. The cameras are in each cockpit of the squadron's six planes, and based on certain angles, there might be at least two cameras in a few of those jets.

We see the pilots. We see the sky or, when a jet is inverted, the ground racing past with a feeling of unnatural vertigo.

When four of the Blue Angels assemble in their signature Diamond Formation, the cameras show us just how perilously close the tip of one jet's wing is to another's, and honestly, it's a little surprising the Navy would grant the filmmakers this much and this sort of access. Some would argue the excitement of watching a live demonstration by the Blue Angels can't be copied in a movie, and maybe that's true.

From the ground and at a considerable distance, though, can anyone really see how close these jets get to each other? The difference between 18 inches and a foot is negligible from a general spectator's perspective. In close-up, it's rather terrifying, because we can see how one little twitch on the controls or some unexpected shift in air flow could be disastrous.

Then again, why wouldn't the Navy agree to this? If we get down to it, the Blue Angels, for all their admirable service to wounded veterans and visits to children in hospitals, are a recruitment tool first and foremost. No one in the documentary says it, of course, and that means nobody really explains why this squadron exists, what its actual history is beyond a couple of names and dates, and how come the Navy might sacrifice some of the allure of seeing a live performance for the greater accessibility a movie offers.

It's unspoken because it's plain. The documentary is an advertisement for the Blue Angels. The Blue Angels are great marketing for the military, and that's pretty much the only reason the movie exists.

That's beside the point of the actual movie, even if it is the entire point of the movie in the first place. Ignore the contradictory wording of that. The spirit of it is the basic idea. There's the movie we get, which is sporadically enthralling but mostly a hodgepodge of personal stories and barely explained details of the specifics of how the Blue Angels operate. All of it has been assembled to put everything in a nice and tidy promotional package. Even a brief mention of the 28 deaths of members of the Blue Angels is oddly optimistic—the need to honor their sacrifice.

Everything feels as if it has been run through a sort of public-relations filter. That includes the personal stories of the squadron members at the time of filming, who explain how they wanted to become pilots at an early age, with the dream of becoming a Blue Angel, whose six members serve two-year tours with the group, being the pinnacle of such a career. Each one talks with the same kind of vocabulary, too, as if there was a briefing of the kind of language that should be used. No, we don't expect them to get into deeper parts of their lives, but yes, it would be nice to hear anything even remotely frank about what it's actually like to risk one's life each and every day during training and demonstrations.

Maybe, it would have been better not to have any of that, though, because the logistics of planning a performance are fascinating. We watch the pilots watching themselves after training, noting how they could have improved and where they messed up considerably. Crowder uses that footage and the material from inside the cockpits to lay out the staging of a show, the measurements of how close the jets come to each other, and other numbers, such as speed and the amount of g-force being exerted on the pilots with each maneuver.

With this level access, the sights and sounds of The Blue Angels are noteworthy. The rest of it is half-hearted filler.

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