When I was a kid, I had a door poster of The Blue Angels. Much like a lot of my generation, Top Gun had a profound effect on me and made me want to be a Naval Aviator myself. Life would end up taking me in a different direction, but I still remain a fan of them to this day; even to the point where I was fully giddy when they flew over my neighborhood during the pandemic as part of their nationwide tour to help lift the spirits of those in lockdown. Now, J.J. Abrams and Glen Powell team up with the director of Last Play at Shea in Paul Crowder to give an up-close-and-personal on the elite pilots in a documentary that is named for them.
Taking place over a calendar year in 2022, the team assembles for three months of intense training as they prepare to travel all over the US to show off their skills. During this time, they deal with working with new pilots, the struggles of being away from home sometimes over three hundred days a year, and even preparing for three new team members to join those moving on. (Note: I learned afterwards that this is not a permanent assignment; officers can only be in up to three years and enlisted personnel can be in up to four years.) All of this along with footage shot so close that the intensity with which this team performs is all right there on the screen.
Seeing this in IMAX actually made me kind of sad because that format will only get it for a week (after that, it is available to watch on Prime Video). Knowing that The Blue Angels was shot for IMAX really motivated me to see it that way, and from a visual standpoint I was not disappointed. The huge screen along with the sharpness of the images and amazing camera work brings their amazing artistry to life in a way that had me leaning back in my chair at certain points as if I was right up there with them. The mere skill of this team in some of the formations they use during their performances is nothing short of awe-inducing, and Crowder shows all of it off.
If there is a downside here, it is in the way the documentary is edited together. The filmmakers do their best to tell the stories of the team balanced with the performances, but the story itself tends to bounce around a bit. I personally would have loved to see the historic parts of the story up front, preparing the audience for the “year in the life” that is the bases for the documentary. There are also some spots that tend to be scanned over (the process by which the new team members are selected and their family lives) that could have been looked into a bit further. Granted, the IMAX part of this would be difficult to pull off in the manner I would hope for in a limited series, but perhaps this could have been the first episode in said series with the remainder joining it on Prime Video.
My hope for The Blue Angels is that it can get a number of “encore” runs perhaps at the museums and things of its ilk that have IMAX theaters (which is how the format began), especially at places like the Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian. The presentation itself truly takes advantage of the format in a way that a lot of films do not and cannot, and it would be a shame for it not to be able to reach a larger audience in the way it should be seen. Granted, if you have a big screen to watch it on, it would still be pretty cool, and you should bring over your friends that don’t so they can experience it as well.
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