The Blue Angels
The blue angels is a nonfiction film about the navy’s flight demonstration team which was made for IMAX, in two senses of the phrase.
First, technically: “The Blue Angels” was shot with Sony’s Venice 2 IMAX certified digital cameras and features IMAX exclusive Expanded Aspect Ratio (EAR) throughout,” according to Cineworld’s website.
Second: It is mostly maybe exclusively a spectacle, as much a display of new technology and the experts who have mastered it as it is about the Blue Angels themselves.
There are lots of low angled “heroic” shots of the pilots and moving shots taken from over their shoulders with a Steadicam as they stride through long corridors, and slow motion shots of them walking towards and away from planes, taking off sunglasses and putting them on again, and moments where they move abreast in a “power walk” formation familiar from many a Hollywood action flick. The movie is an ad for The Blue Angels, the Navy, planes, the military generally, and an iconography-based sense of patriotism that’s just as potent as the “Top Gun” films (the first of which New Yorker critic Pauline Kael memorably described as “a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster”). (The precision flying showcased in the “Top Gun” movies is inspired by The Blue Angels; one of this film’s producers is Glen Powell, costar of “Top Gun: Maverick.”)
And what about the flying itself? And filming it? It’s technically impressive. Not least pictorially framed or poetic (almost nobody wants that here), but impressive. I saw The Blue Angels twice when I was a kid, I remember thinking it seemed physically impossible for such large hunks of metal to fly so close to each other while blasting through space hundreds of miles an hour. But they did it then; they do it again now, for the IMAX cameras, which appear to have been affixed to multiple parts of the planes’ exteriors and cockpits. (How is it possible that we never see those cameras in the shots? Were they digitally erased later? Or are the cameras just that small, and the camera crew just that smart?)
Director Paul Crowder, who also helped edit the film, tries to find a narrative through-line by sketching out the members of the Blue Angels team. He mainly focuses (though not exclusively) on Commanding Officer and Flight Leader, aka “Boss,” Captain Brian Kesselring, who eventually left the Angels and is now Deputy Commander, Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5. “My feeling is, you should never feel too comfortable in the suit,” he says.
Other members of the squadron drift in and out of focus. There’s some material about how much strain it puts on marriages and families when pilots are on the road 300 days a year; but no talk of affairs or divorces or anything like that (the Navy wouldn’t allow it). Toward end of movie we also meet through a fluke of production timing Blue Angels’ first ever female pilot Amanda Lee, and watch her get inducted.
But let there be no mistake. The stars of this show are those planes, as hard as these filmmakers may try to reassure us there are human stories going on here too, what everyone paid to see were precision flying and all training necessary for its existence. And this movie never lets you forget it.
Despite coming across as strange, it is rare for these shots to linger. If you were to shoot and show the movie in IMAX shaking seats, eardrum-bursting surround sound and all why not give us a “scissors cross,” a “delta breakout” or a “loop break cross” from the point of view of one of the flyers for long enough that we feel like the G-forces are pressing down?
Still, the sum does make an impact on account of (Lance Benson, Jessica Young and Michael FitzMaurice) its crystal-clear imagery and its aircraft that dive, climb and roll. The moments that stick with you aren’t just about what it’s like to fly; they’re about what pilots feel when they understand what it means to have been part of this highly selective organization that has only admitted 260 individuals since 1946.
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