This.

I was talking to the guy that flies Scandinavian Historic Flight's "Old Crow" yesterday. It took part in the filming of Memphis Belle. He told me that the Mustangs alone flew 400 hours for the filming of that movie! And that the head-on passes with the Mustangs flying top cover for the B-17s and the Hispano Buchons making head-on passes between them were pretty hairy, to say the least. But the most amazing, and maybe depressing, thing about it all is that the 400 Mustang hours produced 1 minute and 25 seconds of Mustangs on-screen in total!

I'd bet on North Korea.

Agree. Iran would be too controversial and Venezuela or Cuba wouldn't exactly make cinematically exciting bad guys.

Why you felt the need to mention Scientology in this topic is beyond me, but I will just say that it is as valid as any other 'religion' or 'cult' or whatever you want to call it. And the foundation of what Scientology is built on, Dianetics, is a very real self-help practice that arguably has saved my life on occasions. So it's not all a 'fat load of crap', unless of course you care not for my life, at least.

But to comment on the actual topic, I think it would be a bad move to use the F-35 in a sequel to Top Gun. I mean it's not exactly seat-of-your-pants flying like it was in an F-14 Tomcat. In the era of fifth-gen fighters, dogfights are almost non-existent... and if you don't have a dogfight, you don't have a movie. And I doubt that real-life F-35 pilots want to be seen as cocky Navy jocks who represent all that is 'bad' about America, but rather the highly intelligent and reserved people that they surely are.

Just imagine a scene in the movie where an F-35 pilot engages a bad guy with a missile... there wouldn't be this frantic hype and quick-cut editing when an enemy jet comes out of nowhere and locks onto his six. It would be a case of detecting a plane 50-odd nautical miles out on a computer screen, selecting him with a cursor and firing a missile. All done very leisurely in about 10 seconds, the pilot's pulse rate hasn't even raised by 1 or 2 counts. Some time later the missile hits the enemy and a kill is confirmed. Scene ends. Yeah, there you go, yeah!

Since when has accuracy and realism been a priority for Hollywood when it comes to making movies centered on military aviation? What I think will happen is not only will F-35's be used but they will be shown doing WWII-style close-in dogfights with enemy jets.

And you know what? 95% of movie audiences won't know that is inaccurate or won't care.

Of course I know how Hollywood works, and that a major percentage of a movie audience is basically 'dumb' to what's factually accurate or not, but...

... to anyone who rates military aviation above movies, it's simply a sickening injustice.

I agree and yet I'm sure many of us on SimHQ will still go see it just like many of us saw "Red Tails".

I can't see him wearing the helmet either, and wearing the mask uncliped won't help either.

just bring in Charlie Sheen.


is the JHMS required to fly the F-35?

I, for one, would enjoy that kind of movie. Oh, if only I could feed the whole Hollywood with my money alone..