Regardless of whether they were CGI or not, or exactly how you define 'CGI,' a lot of those scenes looked at least partially faked. It kind of struck me as odd that someone wearing a space suit could just hop in to a plane, fire it up, and go. I've personally watched SR71 and U2 pilots mount up at air shows, and it's a big deal. The pilots need a lot of help and ground support. Help with putting on their space suits and securing them. Help getting in to the plane. Help getting strapped in. Help securing ladders and APU's. Help steering the things with visual signals. Maybe Cirrus was the contractor for that Mach 10 aircraft?
Every flying scene had a real aircraft on screen initially. Some of them, especially the Tomcat, had the aircraft later reskinned via CGI to a different airplane. Maybe I'll notice that when I watch it again eventually, but on the first viewing, I knew that and didn't notice.
Maybe it was mentioned already, but what exactly was the rank/job title for Maverick’s sidekick, the big black guy? Crew chief for the Darkstar, flight test commander, plane captain for an F-18, arresting gear chief, mentor to the pilots, what? Dude is everywhere and doing everything, a modern day Renaissance man.
As a photographer, I’d cut the movie some slack for opting to make the movie more exciting vs perfectly realistic. Kinda like staging a shoot - you are trying to tell a particular story and sometimes you frame the picture to capture as much as possible even if the reality is less glamorous. Of course it would’ve taken time to suit up and get in, but they compress the timeline to make it a better movie that doesn’t drag.
I get it, I'm being nitpicky. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the movie. I really liked how Val Kilmer was worked in to the story.
He’s a Navy CWO4. Warrants can get away with writing their own orders and disappearing for weeks at a time. The command won’t even notice until you get back and turn in your travel voucher.
I actually thought they staged that particular part well....with a montage of saturating O2, suiting up...and didn't he arrive in the morning and takeoff in the evening?...or maybe it was evening to morning? Who cares...that part especially was off the charts fiction. I just appreciated...as someone here earlier pointed out....that they didn't have a character explaining to all the experts in the room the most basic of points just so that the non-flying public audience will know what's going on.
The first time I saw Natural Born Killers I thought it was a disgrace. The second time, I considered it as a movie made through the eyes of an insane person, and I thought it was brilliant.
It's interesting that the Army is the only branch that uses warrants for pilot duty. Most Army helicopter pilots are warrants. By law, a commissioned officer has to pilot manned military aircraft. Warrants are commissioned officers, technically, as I understand it, they are commissioned by congress, and not the president. We had this term... RCO's. They were 'Regular Commissioned Officers' to differentiate them from warrants, which would predominate flight squadrons and motorpool maintenance, etc. when you had a large pool of warrants mixed in with normal officers.
WO1s were supposed to be commissioned by the POTUS starting in 2011 but I don’t think AD ever adopted it. Think it’s still an appointment by SEC Army. CW2-CW5s are all commissioned by the POTUS. The acronym RLO was popular when I was in for Real Live Officer. Basically 2LT and above.
