Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

andrew muhling A story of a green squadron on a US carrier in the Pacific in 1944. When they land on the USS Princetown, they find their new CO is a cold, tough as oak, stickler for the book. The CO also delivers his lines as though he's made of oak. There is plenty of good flying action. I also liked the historical footage of battleships conducting shore bombardment. The plot is leaky and the squadrons' planes morph from Corsairs, to Hellcats and even to Helldivers. It is all pretty predictable and the characters are hard to feel attached to. But I think the hardest thing to stomach is the levity displayed by the US pilots when they are killing people. It's a war people, not a football game.Das Boot, Enemy at the gates or even Tora Tora Tora are a much better bet for your evening battle flick.

a666333 This film seems to never go away. I am not sure why. Perhaps because of Sterling Hayden, perhaps because of the footage of WW2 vintage aircraft and ships. I am fan of both but there is just not much to this. Hayden is on a carrier near Korea and starts recalling his WW2 days and we go quickly to an extended flashback of that. From then on, we get predictable scenes on the carrier involving the various personal issues of the pilots interspersed with stock Navy footage edited into dogfights, formations flying, bombing runs, landings and takeoffs. That is it, don't hope for anything else. The aerial footage itself will not satisfy the purist unless you hope to entertain and flatter oneself with identifying all its inconsistencies. Pilots can take off in a Hellcat, fly in a Corsair, bomb in a Helldiver or Avenger and then land in a Hellcat even though they are supposed to be part of a 1944 Navy fighter squadron which should almost certainly be using Hellcats exclusively. It is really quite an impossible mishmash that would give a good chuckle to any pilot from the time.

Robert J. Maxwell Richard Carlson is the pilot who lands a green squadron aboard the USS Princeton, but before they can take a crack at those Japs they all must be whipped into shape by their tough commander, Sterling Hayden. The combat missions increase in difficulty and some losses are incurred but eventually they straighten up and fly right, thanks to Hayden's unyielding demands.Most of the combat footage is familiar from other films about the war in the Pacific. If I see that flaming Japanese fighter skimming the surface of the ocean and curving into the ocean one more time, I think I'll -- well, I don't know what I'll do. Write a love letter to Lindsay Lohan or something equally crazy.Some of the newsreel photos are fresher than that. In one case, we see from the bridge of a carrier the slow-motion bounce of a Corsair that brings the airplane and its monstrous propellor, the size of windmill blades, careering into the superstructure just below the camera placement. I can't imagine how the photographer escaped with his legs intact.At the same time, though, there is a reckless disregard for historical niceties and for continuity. We see the American aviators in the distinctive cockpits of Corsairs (the Japanese are seen in mock ups of canopies from later models of the F6F Hellcat) and the next we see from external shots that they are flying Hellcats or Helldivers or Douglas Dauntlesses. You don't really need to be an airplane aficionado to find this a little irritating. If you're anything but an underaged clod you'll find it annoying. It's like watching a movie of a man driving a speeding car on the freeway and in the next shot he's bent over a bicycle's handlebars on a country road.The plot is a version of the process that had already become cinematic fodder and was to continue serving the same purpose, a thread to hang other events and developments on. The new commander must take charge of a group that is either new to combat or disillusioned by it. Often, as here, he has a tender-minded executive officer who is too close to his men and seems to be coddling them. The commander must be cruel in order to be kind. It's his job to be tough on them because no matter how miserable he makes their lives, it's nothing compared to combat. I'll mention "Take the High Ground," "Patton," "Twelve O'Clock High," and "Flying Leathernecks" as other examples.But although the ultimate goal is lofty enough, the dynamics are really more interesting from a psychological point of view. One thing about military training, or any other preparation for a life-and-death enterprise, is that it provides an outlet for sadistic impulses of the commander. In the movies, the commander almost always ends up showing his humanitarian side. ("The Caine Mutiny" is an anomaly in this regard.) And we, the audience, watch with delight as the commander goes from man to man, ripping each subordinate a new sphincter. Sigmund Freud called it Schadenfreude, taking joy in seeing the pain inflicted on someone else who's shown weakness. And the caring quality of the commander that is revealed at the end, when his men understand him and his motives better, is a sop thrown to the audience so they don't have to feel guilty about having enjoyed all the pain they've just witnessed. I once had a skipper like that. On the surface he was kind of crusty and abrasive, but underneath that he was a sack of sentimental mush. And underneath THAT he was a real MEAN SOB.There's an interesting movie buried in this strictly routine genre film but no one has bothered to try digging it out. Certainly not the writers. ("We're going to hit them, and hit them hard.") I generally like war movies because war is in many ways the ultimate experience -- putting your life at risk because a stranger orders you to and without any hope of personal profit. But it's disappointing when they treat war as if it were something that only belongs in comic books or cartoons. The total social calamity that war represents is cheapened.

dtduke My pet peeve for most World War 2 movies (this one included) is the switching from one aircraft type to another in the same sequence, namely, a Corsair starts take-off and a Grumman Hellcat or Douglas Dauntless leaves the flight deck, or starting a dive-bomb attack with a Corsair and then showing a Hellcat completing the pass. There are many instances of this inconsistency in the film, but if you get past that it's OK. Also, Ensign Smith would probably not have been grounded for as long as it seemed he was (maybe a month), what with the need for pilots and the expense of his training. I know this was a plot move to make his return to the air at the end seem more dramatic, but it was a bit unrealistic.