So help me, I actually had a blast when I saw Stealth with the wife a couple weeks ago. I wouldn’t say I “liked” it, exactly, but there was something kinda fun about leaving my movie-critic notebook at home and sitting back and basking in the sheer cheesiness of this film. And as I said in my most recent column, it can be fun to talk about the issues raised in films like this, even when — if not because — the films are so impossible to take seriously.
Part of it may be that, unlike The Island, which starts pseudo-smart and then gets really dumb, Stealth starts really dumb and then gets, uh, quasi-pseudo-smart. I also had fun noting how the artifically-intelligent super-plane follows a character arc that includes bits of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), Short Circuit (1986) and the HAL of both 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984; my comments).
And I got the feeling that at least some of the humour in this film was intentional; I especially liked the last scene, the scene where two people are supposed to kiss, except they don’t, exactly. After sitting through the unrelenting tedium and flat romantic dialogue delivery of Fantastic Four, with its cringe-inducing final kiss-me scene, I thought Stealth was, comparatively speaking, a breath of fresh air; and I thought the film had found an ingenious way to cover up the fact that its stars had virtually no chemistry.
So it’s been a bit disappointing to see that so few other critics seem to “get” the film on its own stupid level. But now comes National Post columnist Scott Feschuk to the rescue — and he says the movie wasn’t stupid enough! It’s a hilarious read.
Although even I wouldn’t go so far as to say, even in jest, that Jessica Biel should have been replaced with Jessica Simpson. As I told a friend of mine last night, when explaining why The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) didn’t quite work for me, what makes a stupid film truly work is when it doesn’t know it’s stupid. And casting someone like Simpson in a mega-budget high-tech action flick like this would have signalled that the producers were all too aware of how stupid their film really is. One of the things I like about Stealth in its present form is that you’re not really sure just how aware of their own stupidity the filmmakers really were.
(FWIW, as I also told my friend last night, there is a difference between bland earnestness, which is what Ed Wood films have, and earnest blandness, which is what Cadavra has — but that’s neither here nor there where Stealth is concerned.)
Oh, and why “Swiss” cheese? Because it’s so full of holes! I owe this quip to “BBBCanada” in Windsor, Ontario.
UPDATE: Also check out Feschuk’s send-up of the Hollywood thinking behind the making and marketing of The Island!
AUG 5 UPDATE: Good gravy, I think Andrew Coffin of World magazine may have latched onto one of the reasons why I kinda “like” this film (if “like” is, in fact, the right word). He writes:
Do you develop emotional attachments to technology? Have you ever thrown out an old desktop computer and wept? If so, Stealth — a movie that features a climactic scene involving a computer sacrificing its “life” as grandiose, vaguely religious music fills the soundtrack — may be for you.
I don’t recall ever weeping when divesting myself of old machines, but I do know that it felt kind of “safe” when I sold my first CD player to my parents — and I fondly touch its buttons whenever I visit their place. And I am the sort of person who used to take photos of every pair of shoes I was about to throw out, whenever I got a new pair; somehow, it felt right to commemorate them.
And like I said in my Vancouver Sun feature on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001; my BCCN review; my CT review), “When HAL’s creator bids him a sad farewell in 2010: The Year We Make Contact . . . I found the moment genuinely moving.”
Ditto the scene in the TV-movie Prototype (1983) where the android played by David Morse sacrifices himself for the sake of his creator, who is played by Christopher Plummer. The line where the android tells his creator not to give him a goodbye hug, because “you’ll feel the metal,” always used to choke me up.
Heck, my eyes are moistening just thinking about that scene.
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