Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “The Blue Angels” Documentary Wishes To Celebrate, Rather Than Inform

“The Blue Angels” follows the veterans and newest class of Navy and Marine Corps flight squadron as they go through intense training and into a season of heart-stopping aerial artistry.

It isn’t even an unspoken rule that the job of the makers of a documentary is to inform. That is – or should be – the goal by default with such a project. When such a film falls short of its goal, the time spent with the subject has been wasted. Typically, the least helpful pieces of documentary filmmaking are, in fact, the kind of profiles that reside within a museum setting. One is undoubtedly familiar with the type: Having approached an exhibit of some sort, one stands and watches passively as information about the exhibit’s subject is either narrated over a slideshow of photos or shown to us in a montage of archival footage. Perhaps the video is helpful at the moment. It’s rarely, if ever, cinematic, though, and only two things separate “The Blue Angels” from resembling one of these exhibits.

The first one is obvious: If we are viewing the film, either during its planned one-week engagement on the big screen or upon its imminent arrival to a major streaming platform, anywhere but inside a museum devoted to the aerobatic flight demonstration squad of the title, then, of course, it is not a museum exhibit. The second is that, in a museum setting, we are unlikely to receive the jolt of watching the admittedly spectacular sequences of flight-demonstrating that have been captured and compiled by director Paul Crowder, which are the very reason the film is getting a theatrical release of some sort in the first place (though, certainly, the participation of J.J. Abrams and Glen Powell as producers helped to get the right eyeballs on the project at the start).

The apparent appeal of the Blue Angels is their seemingly improbable ability to coordinate flight movements together and in perfect sync. Those lucky enough to see them in action already know this, so part of Crowder’s job as director is to communicate the joy of being in an audience for such a presentation to those who have not. On that basis, the film is a reasonably qualified success. The sequences are thrilling (Lance Benson and Michael Fitzmaurice served as aerial directors of photography and deserved all the credit for their accomplishments), but there is a mechanical nature to the way the director and his editors have rendered nearly every bit of footage not devoted to talking heads or those flight demonstrations in slow motion, complete with a flowery, adoring, and overtly patriotic music score (by James Everingham and Stewart Mitchell).

It’s also telling that the individual human stories fall to the wayside here simply because Crowder seems so overwhelmed by his overall assignment to pay tribute to the squadron, seemingly under the watchful eye of the United States Navy itself. For all we know, this may be the only way to make a documentary about the Blue Angels. It certainly seems to have been a squadron without much controversy, aside from some deaths that occurred during training for the exhibition. The one time we learn about a death during the stint shared by the human subjects in this documentary, the film’s tone turns temporarily funereal. The participants remembered their friends fondly, and then things got back on track, as they had to do so for the squadron to function.

That’s the problem with documentaries like this one, which never rises above the level of a generalized, thoroughly unengaged profile. No impulse exists even to discuss the stories of the people we meet, mainly because they could all be reduced to some variation on the same sequence of events (an early inspiration, the work put in to qualify, and the happy day they were chosen out of several thousand candidates). It doesn’t dig into their lives beyond some mention of families and the support they’ve given, but it also doesn’t actually explore the history of the Blue Angels beyond some generic facts that could reside in any encyclopedia. “The Blue Angels” introduces a subject worthy of a documentary (possibly even a series, given greater scope than a single class of pilots) and gives us the bullet points of one paragraph in an essay about it.

Experience “The Blue Angels” in IMAX® for one week only, May 17th – 23rd,
and streaming on Prime Video Thursday, May 23rd

 

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2 Comments

  1. Steve Jagger says:

    I thought the film was incredible. And the men and women of the team have ability we can only dream of.
    It seems you would rather have the Derry Girls version, with catty discussions and petty infighting. Garbage TV. If only you were a little taller the film may not have gone over your head.

    1. Oh boo hoo dumbass, get over your little man complex!

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