Updating the Top Gun style men-and-their-planes film for the new millennium is not, in itself, a terrible idea (although it's unlikely that doing so would result in a decent film). However, grafting onto the genre some nonsense about an artificially intelligent plane is just stupid and, more damningly, pointless. Even the most gullible conspiracy theorist doesn't imagine that we're anywhere close to being able to create artificial intelligence. Besides which, if you're gonna make the plane behave and sound like HAL 9000, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the plot's headed.
I guess it's a function of having no real enemies to fight. Rather than create some believable geopolitical conflict to give our flyboys something to fight (and possibly alienate some of that international audience looking to drink from the trough of American special effects extravaganzas) Cohen and Co. needed to make the conflict internal within the Navy. (After all, terrorists, the only politically correct villains out there, don't have any planes.) So they came up with this nonsense about the AI plane. But at least that plot development is understandable (stupid, but understandable). Having Jessica Biel (one of the top three fighter pilots in the Navy... uh-huh) shot down in North Korea so that the AI plane and her boyfriend can make a dramatic landing and save the day is just laughable. Taking this film out of the sky is a terrible mistake. The only thing it has going for it are the flying sequences that, being the first of the digital age, are at least noteworthy and startling. To turn the movie into a search and destroy mission near the Demilitarized Zone makes no sense. And besides, since there's no possibility that she's going to be harmed in any significant way, it also robs the film of any tension.
Rob Cohen makes movies to make money. He's said so in countless interviews and on the commentary track of his magnum opus The Fast and the Furious. But his last two films (XXX and Stealth) have tanked. I don't believe this means anything about the American movie-going public at large but at least the bean-counters in Hollywood are going to hesitate before handing this idiot a hundred million dollars again.
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