 Critics are also accusing director Rob Cohen and the makers of Stealth of stealing. "Stealth has pilfered from Top Gun, 2001: A Space Odyssey and a few other places to produce a slick piece of summer entertainment that is counting on elaborate special effects to make its derivative, convoluted story line all but irrelevant," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. But other critics suggest that what audiences end up watching is a big-screen video game with endless explosions. Comments Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle: "Beyond mind-numbing explosions, Stealth's effects are good, especially the whooshing flight scenes. But as Eddie [a robot jet with a mind like 2001's HAL] shows, humanity matters, and computer wizardry won't fill an empty plot. It's not the future of digital warfare that concerns us, but the future of digitally driven cinema." On the other hand, Michael Sragow observes in the Baltimore Sun: "If you like hard bodies and hot engines, if you want to feel like you're inside a cockpit or a video game with someone else working the joystick, you'll find decent escape from the summer doldrums in Stealth." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe. however, worries: "The issue is that this is exactly the sort of movie we don't need right now: a delusional military fantasy in which collateral damage doesn't exist." |
