December 17, 1903 was the day that changed everything from travel to how wars were fought. On a baron's land in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, were the first people to ever take flight on their hand-built plane. Fast-forward 120 years, and the airline industry is thriving (and fooling everyone). Although airplanes look drastically different from Orville and Wilbur's designs, their creation is responsible for transporting hundreds of millions of people around the world each year.
Plus, their relatively simplistic concept has helped air forces around the world win wars, carry life-saving supplies, and even send astronauts into space. Aviation is often employed in film production with drones and helicopters being used to capture some truly majestic scenes. Likewise, there have been some equally majestic films that have made the Air Force the subject of action and drama. Let's look at the best movies about the Air Force...
7 Good kill
New Zealander Andrew Niccol, the man behind 2011's On time and the fantastic, underrated 2005 Nicolas Cage movie Lord of War, was on the executive watch for 2014's Good kill. A film that put Ethan Hawke at the center of the action as Major Thomas Egan, an American drone pilot during the war in Afghanistan. A film that is inherently anti-war, Good kill follows Egan operating in a Portakabin thousands of miles from where his decisions wreak havoc.
Good kill shows how the psychological conflict and agony of the inhumanity of the job takes its toll on the operation's orchestrators, and how the new technologies used by the Air Force can be extremely lethal, even inhumane, to the pilots.
6 Unbroken
Angelina Jolie's directorial debut follows the fascinating true story of former American long-distance Olympian Louis Zamperini (superbly played by Jack O'Connell). An inspiring chronicle of courage, bravery and resilience in the face of evil, Unbrokentells of Zamperini's terrifying ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war after his plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During his imprisonment, Zamperini fell victim to the hateful officer Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Miyavi). He must fight for his survival and his ever-dwindling hope.
5 Torah! Torah! Torah!
Toei
Grabbing the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the 1970 classic, Torah! Torah! Torah! provides an alternative view, from the Axis perspective. When Japanese fighter jets descended on Pearl Harbor in the winter of 1941, unbeknownst to them, they were about to open a can of worms in which two atomic bombs bubbled invisibly beneath the surface. A groundbreaking, unique film for its time, Torah! Torah! ToraI was a co-production by American and Japanese artists that attempts to humanize Air Force pilots on both sides of the war.
Written and directed by several filmmakers (including uncredited work by the distinguished ghost of Akira Kurosawa), the film tells the story of growing tensions and unrest between the Americans and the Japanese, culminating in the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor: A film that is exceptionally acted, thoughtfully paced and historically accurate.
4 The good stuff
The subject of the 2020 Disney+ remake, from 1983 The good stuff is written and directed by Philip Kaufman and based on the classic non-fiction book by Tom Wolfe. The film tells the story of the US space program and how it began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, attempting to break the sound barrier with the Mercury Project, using some of the bravest test pilots in aviation history.
The film tells the story of the Mercury 7 (members of the Air Force, Army and Navy) that would make the unprecedented journey into space in the early 1960s. The historical epic is an all-encompassing look at the goings-on at NASA during the build-up to the operation and all the associated complications, and is one of those rare, red-blooded patriotic films that is actually a masterpiece.
3 Top gun
Tony Scott's much-missed Air Force aerodynamic classic was a truly iconic 1980s title. Tom Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell takes on Val Kilmer's Tom Kazansky, two newcomers to the revered Top Gun program.
Set against the soundtrack of Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone," Top gun served as a cultural reference point and building block for Tom Cruise's future endeavors as a big-budget blockbuster action star. The film follows Maverick's daring antics in the cockpit and his attempts to swoon his civilian instructor, Charlie (Kelly McGillis).
2 Dunkirk
A film that appears frequently in lists of military films, that of Christopher Nolan Dunkirk is not a film you would naturally associate with the Air Force, but in his sensationally shot, cinematic chronicle, the Memento director relies heavily on a three-point perspective. From land, sea and air, we get a multi-dimensional view of the evacuation efforts of the Allies and the British public.
Tom Hardy stars as Farrier, an extremely talented Spitfire pilot who is caught up in a nerve-racking dogfight with the Luftwaffe as he tries to repel the air raid on the vulnerable British forces in Normandy. A film that expresses the true meaning of courage, and the sheer skill and unnerved temper of the pilots involved.
1 Top gun: Maverick
The movie and actor Steven Spielberg credited with "saving Hollywood's ass" and "even theatrical distribution", the Tom Cruise-led Top gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing film of 2022, and the critical love-in matched the commercial hype. 36 years after the release of the 1986 original, Cruise was back to reprise the role of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell.
In this action-packed military propaganda film, Mitchell, now a middle-aged man, is still haunted by the death of his treasured co-pilot and friend "Goose," now an instructor in the Air Force's Top Gun program who trains new recruits for a special mission involving an unnamed country and the destruction of its suspected uranium enrichment plant. Top gun: Maverick is an all-action, G-force-defying affair, balancing between plunging into episodes of nostalgic memories while keeping a close eye on the runway of the present.
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