Well, it’s a documentary about The Blue Angels but clearly endorsed by the US military so you know it’s only gonna have a positive spin. But also it’s an IMAX documentary so it’s just going to be a bunch of pretty pictures without any actual hard info. It took me some self-negotiating to bother with the flick.

And, yeah, this is just a PR reel for The Blue Angels… no warts at all. And if you don’t know what The Blue Angels are, this isn’t the doc to explain it to you. Nobody simply states, “The Blue Angels are a flight demonstration squad of the US military. They perform aerial maneuvers and stunts at air shows.”

They never tell you the basics nor do they provide anything but a bare-bones background of why they exist at all. About fifty minutes into the film, they do some very rapid hand-waving explanation but I wanted more.

Instead, the film mainly shows off the very impressive flying using the IMAX cameras. Kind of exactly what you’d expect from a 45 minute IMAX doc… except this is a 90 minute doc. So we also get some pretty good interviews of the pilots and ground crew as they go through a full air show season across the US.

And that can be interesting… I had no idea there was a team of 141 people to put the show on. Or that the pilots are only in the team for a few short years… though they never quite explain why such a short tour. They show some of their training in cockpit, in meetings, and in G-Force centrifuges (including some good old fashioned G-LOC).

Only about five minutes of history on the Blue Angels… and certainly nothing negative since this is just a bit of PR. And IMAX porn.

This doc gets its point across and told me some interesting things about the stunt team… but not enough. But I guess I went in thinking it’d just be a shallow IMAX documentary that would just be tight formation flying only… and I got a little more than that.

Score: 77