The shots of the Soviet MIG 21 flight using models was OK for 1967, the year the film was shot and edited, but showing film of US Phantom F4 fighter bombers flying by as MIG 21s was just plain awful. They don't look at all alike and MIG 21 model shots could have sufficed.
shareI agree; this kind of "film-making" really rankles me. This (incorrect aircraft types) is why I dould not get into "Top Gun" - F-5's don't look like ANY kind of MIG, but that is what the filmmakers used.
shareNot everybody knows one aircraft from another, so it went under a lot of peoples' radar.
But everybody knows that when the wind is whistling and people are wearing fur parkas, the fur moves. Not in this movie it doesn't. Why not just put a fan on the set? It would have scattered the styrofoam snow.
They showed the model shots for about a minute in very long and detailed shots! One would have to be completely blind and/or an idiot to not recognize that the stock footage later on shows completely different aircraft.
--------------------------------------------------------
~No matter where you go, there you are~
It was the sixties, in the middle of the cold war. You couldn't simply hire a couple of MiGs to do a fly by. There weren't any. So , while I usually am pretty nerdy about details like this (the tanks in Battle of The Bulge, grrr), in this movie I could sort of respect the choice to film a couple of US jets to nice up the modelkit MiG 21 sequences.
Of course the choice of stand-in plane is debatable, but the problem is with silhouet of the MiG 21: it has a delta wing but with a tailplane. The only plane I can think of right now (sorry, it's fridaynight... ;-) )in the US inventory which has the same kind of silhouet (although pretty far-fetched) is the F-4 Phantom. Oh, and the A-4 Skyhawk.
Oh, and the Top Gun thing, yeah, it's basically the same deal. And in that movie they had the decency to make up a fictitious MiG model. Plus, they used the F-5, a beautiful design you see too little of in movies. Sorry, I'm, obviously, a bit of a nerd. :-)
So, to conclude, for me it didn't really impact my opinion of the movie. What did was the ungodly slow pace and editing. 140 minutes?! If they made it a tight 90 minutes movie it would've been a cool period spystory, which could've easily be enjoyed 50 years later. But the plot just isn't that impressive to justify the slow pace and length.
[deleted]