Stealth



Stealth is a 2005 science fiction action/techno-thriller film directed by Rob Cohen, starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard, and Wentworth Miller. The movie originally started out as an adaptation of the video game franchise Star Fox, and was written by W. D. Richter of Big Trouble in Little China fame, however, the script ended up being rewritten by several ghost-writers.

The movie was a colossal box office bomb, making only $76 million worldwide out of a $135 million budget. It is also considered to be one of Cohen’s worst movies ever, earning a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert described the movie as a "dumbed-down Top Gun crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from 2001."

Despite the movie’s awful reputation, however, its fictional aircraft design has been praised for being impressive to the point of tricking some people into thinking they were actual top-secret fighter prototypes prior to the film's release, as well as appearing in unofficial modifications for video games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Tom Clancy’s HAWX.

Plot
It’s the near future. The US Navy has developed an aviation program to combat the mounting threat of international terrorism. Of the 400 pilots who applied for the program, only 3 were chosen: Ben Gannon (Lucas), Kara Wade (Biel), and Henry Purcell (Foxx). The result of the program was the F/A-37 Talon, a single-seat stealth fighter capable of "destroying the enemy, wherever they operate in the world".

After a training mission, the 3 pilots are told by their commanding officer, George Cummings (Shepard), that they will be accompanied by a new wingman: an unmanned combat air vehicle called the Extreme Deep Invader, or "EDI" (Miller). The pilots take part in a test flight with EDI when they are suddenly sent on a mission to neutralize a terrorist threat in Myanmar. However, after the mission ends with success, EDI is struck by lightning and becomes sentient, choosing to set "himself" free from "his" former masters. It’s up to the pilots to stop EDI.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) Poor first impression. The very first scene of the movie is a cliché training sequence.
 * 2) Cliché and downright unlikable protagonists.
 * 3) Awful sex jokes. The fact that the UCAV is dubbed "Extreme Deep Invader" can baffle viewers due to the fact that it sounds like the title of a porn movie.
 * 4) Does a poor job in blending its futuristic themes to a realistic setting.
 * 5) Clumsy and pretentious social commentary about drone warfare, which is diluted by the way the action scenes are portrayed.
 * 6) The main story goes nowhere and abruptly changes in the third act.
 * 7) The actions of the protagonists have rather horrifying implications, all of which are glossed over; by the end of the movie they pretty much kickstarted World War III.
 * 8) False Advertising: The box cover stated that the ultimate battle begins in the sky implying that a war was going to happen but it's nothing more of chasing a rouge drone down as it blows things up.
 * 9) It is absolutely rip-off of Top Gun and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 12% based on 141 reviews, with an average rating of 3.74/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Loud, preposterous, and predictable, Stealth borrows heavily and unsuccessfully from Top Gun and 2001.". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 35 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B-" on scale of A to F.

Trivia

 * The film was rumored to have originally been planned as a live-action adaptation of Star Fox.