Good point. In the RW what they were doing is called 'buddy lasing', but with Super Hornets each plane could have carried a designator and bombs. Maverick himself did it when he 'demo'd' the mission after being grounded. It would have been more realistic to have gone in with 4 F-18F's, each with a backseater, and had redundancy on the target designation for each two-ship section. Like the original, there were a lot of technical inaccuracies in this movie, but a lot they got right as well. But as I mentioned in a prior post, if the target is that vital to hit, you don't go in half-assed with a single division of planes. Since you are committing an overt act of war anyway, might as well go all-out and launch a full deck strike, and make sure the job gets done right. EW/Jamming, SEAD, TARCAP, the whole kitchen sink. That would have made the ending very convoluted, however, and taken away from all the character elements. This was a great 'hollywood' version.
But the problem with going in with a much larger group was the enemy become alerted and firing off their air defences and lauching their own aircraft. There was pretty much only enough time to get a small group. Even with jamming aircraft etc you're going to take heavy losses and the enemy is going to know you're coming.
Well, the one thing they sort of glossed over was any sort of enemy radar picking up that entire flock of inbound cruise missiles that preceded the planes, so the 'element of surprise' was pretty contrived here, anyway. There is a methodology to strike planning that won't be discussed here, but in general terms the aim is to maximize surprise and your advantages. If planned and executed properly, it works well. If done poorly, casualties mount. In the movie, even as it was presented, they still lost half the planes they sent in. And the GPS 'thing' that forced them to use F-18's was totally contrived as well. IRL, the F-35 would have been a better choice all around to do exactly what the Super Hornets did.
Pretty good stuff even if it just hit the same bases as the original. If I had a complaint it would be that I didn't really buy the romance with Jennifer Connelly. The F14 stuff was ridiculous in such an 80s adventure cartoon way that I couldn't help but love it. So yelling "YO JOE!" as you ambush the enemy is a bad idea? My childhood was a lie!
Yeah for saying sexual chemistry was such an integral part of the original, the zero chemistry between Cruise and Connelly was so palpable as to suggest it was intentional. And the F-14 stuff was just wonderfully preposterous!
I saw a clip of Maverick's practice run. It reminded me of the Death Star trench run from Star Wars. It was ludicrous on so many levels (Couldn't they have sent in a drone? Couldn't they have lobbed a cruise missile at it? Was it necessary to send in a fighter group?) "Use the Force, Luke ..."
Okay, could we all just stop overthinking this? Yes, they could have used more planes. Yes, they could have had the Super Hornets bomb the target. Yes, they could have used F-35s. Hell, they could have sent a SEAL team or a Force Recon platoon with a laser pointer in place of the Super Hornets, or a "Wild Weasel" wave of Super Hornets to take out the SAM batteries first, or, fuck, just nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. It's a Tom Cruise action movie, not a documentary thesis on Naval air strikes. I, for one, am just happy I finally got to see it, and I'm more than satisfied to handwave the nature of the strike by saying "it's politically necessary" or some nonsense, because a quartet of F-18s aping the Death Star trench run (which itself apes a WWII bomb strike on a dam) was friggin' awesome to see. It was fun, in a way that movies haven't been fun for ages. I'm good with that.
If people haven't seen the Dambusters, it really is amazing how much Lucas lifted for Star Wars, even some of the dialogue. The Dambusters is a fine film setting aside an unfortunate, but historically accurate, racist name for the dog (I've been to the Dambusters' airbase and the dog has his own grave and the name is still on there.) I'm still waiting for Peter Jackson to remake it! I'd hoped the success of Dunkirk might have nudged it into a green light but sadly no.
Do we necessarily need a 6-hour long 3D version of it, filmed on some groundbreaking new cameras that ultimately add little to the viewing experience though?
The movie required a jet where an actor could sit in the back seat and pretend to be flying. The end.
I don't know if you're being tongue in cheek or simply missed it because that's exactly what they did. They got 2 seater F-18, the pilot in the front did the actual flying and the actors were sitting in the back acting. For this to work they needed even to invent a completely unique Imax camera setup they could mount into the F18 without compromising safety and anything else in the F18. There are enough clips on Youtube detailing the filming process and it's quite interesting from a technical point of filmmaking.
Ward Carroll has put a new video up looking at the final dog fight scene. Some good stuff (the start up on the F-14) and some cringe worthy (though some of those can be put down to the FX artists such as the flapless take off).