Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

haroun elpoussah Just seen the last episode, "Dogfights of the future" Never seen a documentary about aviation so technically flawed, so biased and so politically oriented, it looks like being some joint venture Lockheed-USAF self centered masturbation or some propaganda to make tax payers at ease to spend billions and billions in what was already known by all air analysts at the time for being the worst military money pit due to lobbying of all times and a strategic scam, the so-called 5th generation fighters concept. Firstly, at the time this documentary was made, it was well known that the B1R air2air missile truck was never to be made. From the beginning, Sukhoi presented the Su47 as just a testbed for inversed wings and never to be something else than a prototype so it is already a very bad journalist job as such infos were public. About the use of laser as an aircraft weapon, we're in pure sci-fi conjecture : past tests were led from a naval corvette recently and a Boeing 747 when Reagan was prez, as it needs enormous amounts of energy to shoot something practical and for the recent tests, it was only able to shoot a small boat and a slow flying drone, both would have been easy preys for WWII weapons, other thing is atmospheric diffraction which would make it maybe efficient against low flying satellites, but it is known for long to be not efficient for long range thru atmosphere targeting and sorry, but from the distance they shoot their laser, they would be easy prey for long range missiles and as they need to focus radar on their target and become so a target too, are big, etc etc, such scenario makes the laser platform to be fastly over, well, even AWACS are in real danger since there are very long range lock-on-radar missiles especially designed to get such platforms, but now, back to the 'star', the F22 : if people at Dassault or Sukhoi or any with real aircraft knowledge have seen those 4 F22 downing about 30 Rafales and Su35, they must have laughed non stop for days! First, shooting AMRAAMs from 100km, it as only a 10% hit probability against a non maneuvering target, non aware of the attack and non using counter measures, understand : and old F4 Phantom made a drone target! The longest effective AMRAAM shot in real combat was no more than 35km! Other thing, as I pointed : long range radar guided missiles need a target illuminating by radar so there is no more stealth as soon as you do it. Only way you can assume it is to go nearer using IRST (infra red targeting) but at such distance, you're inside opposing IRST and as F22 is big, it's in other IRST before himself seeing smaller "gen4+" planes, so, in reality, the BVR was already sold in the 60's and they thought on-board cannon was useless as long reality blew F4s in Vietnam. And well, I don't know from where this mockumentary assumes that only F22 and F35 are the only with stealth capacity : it is built of mostly radar absorbant materials and if it ain't use the passive stealth geometry, it has more potent active stealth by anulating radar signals and other bad-ass thing, so, look what happens when F22 meets Rafale : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOswfrc7Xtg And we don't speak about diponibility : at best, the full USAF F22 fleet can make only 60 missions a day where the same number of Rafales, Typhoons, Grippen, Sukhois, etc could make about 500 missions a day. Passive stealths need special shelters and are grounded for 2/3 days between each flights making'em easy preys on their bases... So, I REALLY don't know what is the point of such kind of childish cartoon? Pumping more money from taxpayers in a time when Bush was still in charge? Reassuring US citizens about they'll keep total air supremacy in the future? The point is I'm interested in all that flies for 40 years and I've never seen or read something as stupid except some stupid Youtube patriotic comments from people that had never been in a cockpit and never handled a yoke.

Robert J. Maxwell It's a marvelous recreation of aerial combat from World War I through modern conflicts. I can't think of any computer-generated graphics (or whatever they're called) that have so convincingly recreated the aerobatics of combat aircraft and explained them so clearly. The aluminum surfaces glisten. The sun always seems to be shining, and when an airplane turns, the shadows on its wings turn with it. If the image is rearward, looking over a wing, you can see the elevators tip up and down slightly as the aircraft climbs or dives. Every detail on the aircraft seems exact. It's beautifully done. The graphics are nicely supplemented by newsreel and combat footage.The narration takes us through the events, one by one, and sometime the participants tell us what they were thinking and what their intentions were. There is some sentiment, not much, in these recollections. The general layout of the conflict is described -- we learn why Mig Alley was so dangerous and why heavy bombers over Europe required fighter escort -- but the politics are absent. For each engagement, the principal characteristics of each airplane are described, and enemy aircraft get their just due.One major observation and one minor. In the episodes I've seen, the victors were all Americans or American allies and the enemy lost, even when the opponent receives credit for being "an expert pilot." We sink the Bismark. We sink the Yamato. We shoot down every enemy airplane in sight, it seems, without losing any of our own. Why Rickenbacker and not von Richthofen, for instance? I wonder if it isn't somehow dangerous for younger and more impressionable viewers to watch a series like this in which we see a simulacrum of a video game in which we always win. The scientific studies of media presentations on real life have produced complex and mixed results. But I wonder. Is there a covert message? And, if so, is it: "Let's go to war and play Dogfight"? One of the pilots interviewed mentions the need in a successful fighter pilot for "skill, aggressiveness, and the fighting spirit." I don't know what a fighting spirit is but fighter jocks seem to have the other two traits in spades. No power on earth could put me in a situation as dangerous as aerial combat. It takes a heap of persuasion to get me off the ground at all. An ancillary note: A curious psychological study of fighter aces in the Korean war found a disproportionate number to be later-born children. There is weak support from other studies showing that later children are a little more open, agreeable, and maybe adventurous. Bomber pilots are more often first borns. George H. W. Bush has said that he preferred flying a Gruman Avenger with a three-man crew during World War II because he wanted the company. That puts him in the wrong slot, an anomaly, because he was the second son. He should have wanted to fly fighters but I'll give him a pass.

castott There should be no doubt that this is a highly biased and jingoistic American program, though, to be fair, it is primarily aimed at an American audience, the concept of American military supremacy ("Americans have never and will never lose a war.") being a large part of the American identity--like it or not. Overall, I regard this series as more entertainment than a collection of historically correct documentaries. If you read official reports of the engagements portrayed in these animations you will, in many cases, discover that some significant details have been omitted or down-played for various reasons. For instance, in the second season episode with Lou Luma, the American RCAF Mosquito pilot, they fail to mention the somewhat important fact that in his portrayed strafing mission (I agree, not really dogfighting) to the German aerodrome, his tail was nearly shot off by anti-aircraft fire (http://www.acesofww2.com/Canada/aces/luma.htm).Americans are generally fond of emphasizing their role in various wars all the while down-playing or ignoring those of their allies, especially in cases where their allies'accomplishments were as good or better. Take for instance the clear anti-British and anti-Canadian (Canadians barely mentioned) bias shown by the celebrated, though increasingly discredited, American "historian" Stephen Ambrose particularly in his books concerning the D-Day landings. Also, consider the attitude that generated the American half-joke regarding the alternate meaning of the acronym of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War 1--"After England Fails". I believe the Australians also have some legitimate complaints regarding the overshadowing of their role early on in stopping the Japanese advances in New Guinea, and their overall achievements in the Pacific Theatre during WW2. Often, it seems that General MacArthur and the American media neglected to fully acknowledge the considerable efforts of the Australians under his command.I think it is inevitable that if this show is to continue they will have to begin focusing more on the aerial exploits of non-American allies and possibly even enemies. There has been absolutely nothing about the Russians in World War 2 (or in any conflict) which is largely inexcusable considering the prime importance of battles on the Eastern Front from mid 1941 to the end of the war (the Americans may not want to recognize the longer and possibly greater role of the Soviet forces in destroying the German Reich), and very little concerning British Empire and French dogfighters in either war which I also think is a shame. I doubt that further depictions of "dogfights" of the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars or Israeli-Arab conflicts will be of sufficiently broad appeal as these are more controversial in terms of the motives behind the conflicts(Americans/Israelis won't necessarily be seen as the good guys) and in most of these cases the battles don't involve true dogfighting skills. Also, I think that they have already covered a lot (most?) of the territory regarding significant American dogfights of WW1 and WW2. Any additional focus on the same will make their biases undeniable.The Americans were "Johnny come latelies" to both of the World Wars so, I don't know how much interest the producers of this show would have in aerial battles/campaigns before their entry, or in the early days following their entry into the wars, (e.g. in the Tunisian Campaign wherein they didn't do that well in the air or on the ground), but it is certainly something to hope for.I await the third season which I assume is now in production.

Strategum Over 90% of all episodes are of American victories. The rest are 'our side', whether Israelis, in admittedly the same one-sided accounts, defeating many times their number of foes, or the RAF who are represented as having to use an American rather than British pilot in a British-Canadian Squadron portrayed shooting down more unarmed planes than warplanes. The series seems to forget that the definition of a dogfight is the aerial combat between fighter planes. Seriously, in 3 seasons not a single mention of "The Battle of Britain"(admittedly the most important series of dogfights to western freedom), the Spitfire nor a British even Canadian star. There is not a single episode where an enemy fighter pilot is the star shooting down an American fighter pilot in a dogfight. That's not 'a little biased', that's 'totally biased'. That's not a 'historical documentary', that's 'propaganda'. Even non-Americans have risked and given their lives for the American ideals of 'Truth and Justice for all', but this series has none of that. I've collected such documentary series in book, tape now DVD form for over 40 years. This is the first one I'll refuse to include.