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So what IS the most accurate war movie about aircraft in War?


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Well it all depends. In terms of machinery accuracy, you probably wont find any one movie that's right. In terms of historical accuracy to events then I'd have to throw up Battle of Britain to be among the most accurate feature films. Tora Tora Tora and Midway were both relatively accurate in terms of order of events but obviously not in using proper machines.

Take out the phoney Mig-28 and the I guess Top Gun would be accurate in terms of other machines used.

All in all you can't expect real accuracy in terms of machinery, but one can ask for the historical events to be made rather accurate, IMO.

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The Blue Max did a very credible job. For WWII based films, Tora Tora Tora, did a very credible job. The AT6's were converted to A6M2's, Kates, and Vals very convincingly. The P-40s that were used/displayed were of the right type, P-40B's. Battle of Britain also did a very good job being that the Luftwaffe was Spanish Air Force birds. Midway was a disappointment. You had wrong model planes for the American and Japanese Navies. In one scene, you had Jap pilots flying SBD Dauntless aircraft painted up as some fictious Japanese plane. Should have used the Tora Tora Tora birds! Why they didn't, who knows. Bridges of Toko Ri was very good, but so was the movie "The Hunters" using F-86's against Mig-15's.

Oh, almost forgot, 12 o'clock High did a good job blending studio B-17's with real combat footage of FW-190's and Bf 109's attacking them.

Edited by Big Texan
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What about Memphis Belle? I'm not sure how accurate it was...but it seemed to capture the mood and feeling of the time period very well.

I'm no expert but it seemed quite accurate given the restrictions regarding the availability of aircraft. The movie even tried to backdate available B-17's for accuracy. They did use P-51's instead of the more time period correct P-47's for the Belle's last mission. But all in all I thought it was a well done movie.

I loved the scene when they sang Danny Boy.

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What about Memphis Belle? I'm not sure how accurate it was...but it seemed to capture the mood and feeling of the time period very well.

I'm no expert but it seemed quite accurate given the restrictions regarding the availability of aircraft. The movie even tried to backdate available B-17's for accuracy. They did use P-51's instead of the more time period correct P-47's for the Belle's last mission. But all in all I thought it was a well done movie.

I loved the scene when they sang Danny Boy.

It really is.

I think the biggest plot ''no-no'' was the fact that their last mission was to bomb Bremen. IIRC it was Kiel.

Nonetheless no matter how ''inaccurate'' the movie is, it captures everything in the movie so well just as you said, and is inspirational.

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Bridges of Toko Ri.

Good pick! Awesome in-flight scenes.

As a runner-up, I really like the cockpit sequences from Dr Strangelove. I know the part w/ Slim Pickens riding the nuke down was bogus but the rest of the B-52 scenes appeared to be very realistic.

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Kind of a interesting thread.

What about The Battle of Britain? Sure it's not completely accurate with the planes used but pretty darned accurate.

12 O'clock high was a good one as was Tora Tora Tora, and I fully agree with Memphis Bell being rather well done on accuracy.

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1- Blue Max

2- Battle of Britain

3- Battle hymn nothing worse than a love story in a war flick.

4- Flying misfits ,Baa Baa Blacksheep- not for the story line but flying scenes

---And not a movie but Battle 360 and dogfights on the history channel, just spectacular.

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I'd have to say Firefox... but then most people will call me crazy because they arent rated 'SUPER DOOPER SECRET' and havent read the file inside the vault under the Hexagon (what, you think they stopped after the pentagon???)

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I'm surprised you guys want the Blue Max in the mix up.

Historically, all the German planes are WAY out of chronological order; i.e. the Fokker Triplane is replacing the tired out old Pfalzs and Fokker D-VII. Other than a handful of 3/4 scale SE-5's they didn't even try for accurate RAF aircraft.

My list agrees with Mark above.

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In my opinion, no film has gotten everything right. But given a fictionalized setting of events, Bridges of Toko Ri and Memphis Belle probably get the ambiance of what went on probably the closest to reality in terms of how things transpired in their own fictionalized stories. Yes I said Memphis Belle as except for the name of the plane, that story was heavily fictionalized making it more the mission of doom as opposed to a "relative" milkrun as the Belle and its crew came through relatively unscathed.

Battle of Britain to me probably conveys the best the real events, albeit a little fictionalized. So you had a cast of characters at three fighter squadrons and not all survived to the end. The green kid died on the first day due to an out of the sun bounce by a 109, one squadron leader (Christopher Plummer's character) got badly burned and another one (Michael Cane) had nothing left to bury when he died. The lines from one flier after he landing his damaged kite just put it in perspective... "They got my number 2, and the CO! He blew up! He just blew up!" The carnage on the German side with the Heinkel crews getting slaughtered also put into perspective just how many men were lost on both sides.

Tora Tora Tora for me is probably the closest to reality as to my knowledge, the characters were real. There were no fictionalized amalgamations with the names changed. But flying in that film only encompassed the last half pretty much and it was more of a telling of the whole Pearl Harbor story in the style of "The Longest Day" as opposed to a tighter focused piece on JUST pilots. Of course, it kind of bombed in the theater. Today it is respected as a classic and the great film it rightly is, but its failure to earn revenue signaled part of the end for the big budget war picture of the 1960s and 70s (and it took until the late 1980s before Memphis Belle and the 1990s before Private Ryan, which were more fictionalized accounts).

Final Countdown I put high on my list because even though it was fiction, it did a very good job in showcasing airwing operations and how a crew might react to a situation where what exactly is going on isn't known. And, if you study the flying footage of the dogfight between the Zeros and the F-14s, whomever choreographed it did a dang good job and it looked intelligent. At first the Zeros are rattled (rightly so), but over time they get to know their adversary as they figure out the F-14s can't stay too slow and when slow are vulnerable. So finally one Japanese pilot opens up to try and shoot one down, acting like a fighter pilot in combat who is trying to use his disadvantage to an advantage. Sure when the F-14s are given permission to fire, they drop the Zeros pretty quick, but the flying scenes showed an evolution to them, not just "hey, lets just show something cool" like say an episode of Airwolf.

As for Iron Eagle, I know people rag on it as cheeseball, but it and Top Gun were probably the first time anyone had attempted to use modern jets to tell stories like that from inside the cockpit (Final Countdown was a start, but the pilots stayed anonymous for the most part). Top Gun had help from the Navy. Iron Eagle practically rented the IAF and in terms of the flying film generated, its footage tends to get more re-used than Top Gun's. There was one line I remember from Louis Gossett Jr. in the movie that summed up aerial combat the best for me though in conveying what kind of a slaughter it was over Vietnam.

"I lie awake at night, thinking about how fast and how brutal they died. Parts of them falling into land, parts of them falling into the ocean, parts of them burning into NOTHING in the middle of the air."

So even a film like Iron Eagle has its moments.

Edited by Jay Chladek
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In addition to some of the usuals mentioned above (B.O.B., 12 o'clock etc...) what about Black Hawk Down? It has some historical descrepencies I'm sure, but the aircraft flying is about as accurate as you can get. Real Blackhawks, Real people, real operations...in a word, real. The only obvious CGI is the crash scene when shown from the control room. But even then they realized they couldn't accurately show a crash in CGI so they resorted to show it on a low res television screen instead of as if the viewer is there. That shows a director that knows the limitations of the technology and doesn't push it simply because they can.

IMHO

Bill

Edited by niart17
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What about Memphis Belle? I'm not sure how accurate it was...but it seemed to capture the mood and feeling of the time period very well.

I'm no expert but it seemed quite accurate given the restrictions regarding the availability of aircraft. The movie even tried to backdate available B-17's for accuracy. They did use P-51's instead of the more time period correct P-47's for the Belle's last mission. But all in all I thought it was a well done movie.

I loved the scene when they sang Danny Boy.

I love this movie but they did get a bunch of stuff wrong. I dont want to even go into the amount of inaccuracies from this movie. But overall it did a decent job of showing what could be seen in a combat mission over europe. And, it got my young'ns interested in aircraft.

My favorite scene in the movie by far is when they star engines, taxi and takeoff. The sounds were freak'n fantastic!

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I think the biggest plot ''no-no'' was the fact that their last mission was to bomb Bremen. IIRC it was Kiel.

The biggest problem with Memphis Belle was that they compressed everything that happened to the crew in 25 missions into about three missions. Had all that happened in such a small number of missions, she probably wouldn't have made it home.

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If all aircraft types are considered I like the way they did "Firebirds" with Tommy Jones and Nicholas Cage, at least they had real aircraft, and the "The Hunters" if you don't mind F-84's imitating MiG's. I know the AIM-9's from the "L" are super sensitive, but would an A6M engine generate enough heat for a winder to detect it. 633 squadron was good, I like the flying scenes in "Call to Glory"; though limited.

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