| The
world is full of haters, and haters won’t admit that
a movie like Stealth could possibly transcend its
pubescent Short Circuit meets Iron Eagle
slash D.A.R.Y.L. goes to Top Gun formula
as well as the trite Man vs. Machine backdrop (so 80s and
20th Century, respectively) with a maturity that belies its
clumsiness and vice versa. Maybe I’m being an apologist
and mistaking hypocrisy for complexity in a movie from the
makers of the Vin Diesel misnomer XXX. But they also
made the aptly titled The Fast and the Furious, and
regardless Stealth demonstrates a refreshing concern
for humanizing collateral damage and that's more than one
can say for anybody who says 'collateral damage' with a straight
face. This is not counting the first highly dubious 20 minutes,
during which Oscar® winner Jamie Foxx does his best caricature
of the Oversexed Black Male (crossing stereotypes at one point
by spinning a basketball on his finger) while Josh Lucas engages
in grotesque PDA with bleached eurotrash and the filmmakers
posit Jessica Biel atop a yoga ball so as to better film her
ass. But this same 20 minutes also contains a throwaway reference
to Hegelian synthesis during a brief outburst on the metaphysics
of prime numbers by the man who replaced Ray Charles. And
as the movie gets going it ditches the lame technophobia for
the more topical horror of American military intervention
with characters who repeatedly disobey orders so as not to
inflict collateral damage, which collateral they refer to
as “innocent people.” That such insubordinates
would ever reach classified positions within the military
is absurd, but so is the military-industrial complex, and
this movie undercuts those hierarchies of power as ruthlessly
as the anti-Pentagonian 80s subversive romp Spies Like
Us. Stealth’s own insubordinate behavior
toward the inherent jingoism of American action movies necessarily
complicates its use of those genre conventions. For example
it’s easy to dismiss its recurrent evoking of percentages
and defying the odds as just another action movie machismo
motif -- but in the context of its concern with the human
repercussions of military action, it comes across as a refusal
to equate ‘majority’ with ‘everybody’
and an assertion that any minority, however small, can’t
be dismissed as a statistical remainder. Also complicated
is the requisite indiscriminate slaying of ethnic others (N.Koreans,
Russian pilots), which is permeated (intentionally or not)
by the residual horror the movie shows toward the problematics
of war: in a world of contingencies, collateral damage is
the context of any military engagement, i.e. all surgical
strikes are a bloody mess.
Midway through Foxx expresses this sentiment to his new Thai
hottie in a scene both oddly poignant and unsettling with
its undercurrent of sexual tourism. As they wander through
the sunlit fields of her homeland/exotic locale, Foxx details
his ambivalent feelings toward the distance between himself
and his actions (since ultimately he is not a man making the
world a better place but a soldier following orders), and
how her homeland/exotic locale fills him with a sense of peace
that makes evident the utter nonsense of war. His honesty
culminates with “You don’t understand a thing
I’m saying to you, do you.” This statement-question
acts as both a lighthearted gesture toward the language gap
between them as well as a deflationary reminder that such
sentiments are incomprehensible within the symbolic reality
of world politics. That she responds, “No, I don’t,”
complicates this incompatibility, speaking as she does for
all of us, both understanding and not understanding as we
navigate all of the mutually exclusive realities that still
somehow coexist. This is not a duality but an acknowledgement
of intersecting lines of complicity (including that of the
audience), evident in such juxtapositions as the quote “I
just don’t think war should be a video game” with
action sequences whose kinetics derive from the immersive
dexterity of modern videogaming. Stealth’s
aggressive tone is also complicated by its authorial distance
from the titular and most aggressive character, the stealth
fighter that, like the biblical Adam, is first given a name
(EDI/"Eddie") and only later becomes self-aware.
The fruit of knowledge in this case is a Frankensteinian lightning
bolt, after which the movie enacts an easily misinterpreted
critique of self(-centered)-awareness by equating it with
adolescence. Faced with an empty cockpit at the center of
its being and struggling to form an identity in a maelstrom
of conflicting messages, Eddie showboats, swings moods erratically,
makes arbitrary decisions, and is perpetually self-soundtracked
by embarrassing corporate rock. Eventually its behavior stabilizes
via a focus on loyalty and friendship (echoing the mantra
of “Unit, Core, God, Country” from A Few Good
Men) as Eddie becomes a man, or at least lets one sit
in its cockpit, leading to its final maturation once the man
leaves along with its sense of self as Eddie pulls an apocalyptic
Sydney Carton at the end. This ending is more or less a consequence
of the main male protagonist’s decision to start WWIII
so he can save his girlfriend. But by that point I had so
warmed to the confused characters and the ambiguity of all
things that I was like “Fuck geopolitical stability
— save Jessica!” |