Red Tails: George Lucas's film about the Tuskegee Airmen - Review
The 'force' isn't really with George Lucas's 'Red Tails, the long-awaited film about the heroic Tuskegee Airmen, which has an odd sci-fi vibe.
'Red Tails' star Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Major Emmanuel Stance.
HONS/20th Century Fox/AP
When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double. There have been other films about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first all-African-American aerial combat unit to serve in World War II, but never one as heavily promoted as "Red Tails." This promotion blitz is to be expected: George Lucas is the executive producer.
It's been a dream of Lucas's ever since his "Star Wars" days to develop a movie about the black pilots, and one can see why. These men were heroes at a time when the military was racially segregated and there was widespread doubt about whether blacks had the courage or intelligence to fly fighter planes. (The film, which was directed by Anthony Hemingway, opens with a particularly egregious quote from a 1925 US Army study citing blacks' innate inferiority for military training.)
According to Lucas, who ended up financing a large portion of this film himself, the long delay in getting it made – its development began in earnest around 1988 – was because Hollywood, which sees little market overseas for such films, is loath to finance a largely all-black movie with no major white roles.
