Customer Reviews

Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience

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Threshold, The Blue Angels Experience, is a visually exciting look into the world of precision flying. It features the Blue Angels flying team. Though filmed in the early 1970s, the subject matter and footage is as alive and exciting as when it was first released.

Although the filming ranges all over, a large percentage is in the cockpit, giving the pilot's eye view, punctuated with the communications among the pilots. At one point, one of the pilot takes his plane into a loop and deliberately lowers the velocity to near stall speed.

Pilot: I just got down to 40 knots in the top of that [bleep].

Other pilot: But you're ok?

Pilot: Ya, but I was pretty scared.

We ride along as two planes close toward each another at 1600 feet per second in a knife-edge pass.

We take off before the reviewing stands and from a pilot's-eye-view watch the Blue Angels diamond close. The Blue Angles diamond is the signature of the flying team -- flying with wing-tip-overlap within 36 inches of another the cockpit of another plane in the diamond.

We fly inverted, slowly, with the landing gear out and look at the world move by "above" us.

We witness four planes, each coming from one of the compass directions, intersect, and see one of them exit at the end of the move, going vertically up to clear some tall pines.

We climb in the diamond and realizes that within seconds we are thousands of feet in the air.

We cross to Hawaii with the team as the jet slow to a crawl to get mid-air refueling -- seen both from the pilot's view point and that of the tanker boom operator.

It was a groundbreaking film in two ways. First, visually. In the early 1970's, no one had been able to capture cockpit footage of precision flying. Today's audience, post-Top Gun and who are accustom to minicameras, will likely not appreciate the leap that this film took. Secondly, it was a new kind of documentary, for the time, in which the words of those who flew and supported the teams spoke, first hand.

It was an ambitious undertaking for a small independent Seattle studio, Filmsmiths, which was better know for making TV commercials. The two principals in studio, Dave Gardener and Paul Marlow, recruited some big guns and some top guns. To the big guns: Frank Hebert, author of "Dune" wrote the script. Longtime Hollywood actor Leslie Nielsen, "The Naked Gun," narrated.

As for the top guns, the Navy never told the pilots to work with the film makers: Director Paul Marlow recounted, "this never was an 'official' film." The Filmsmiths crew traveled to Blue Angeles Airshow after Airshow. At first the fliers did not take the film makers all that seriously. There always were people who would show up with film equipment, once ... until the next film maker would do the same. The Filmsmiths team kept following the Blue Angels and over time the fliers began to open up, so much so that the fliers helped bolt cameras onto their planes and even brought Paul Marlow along on the knife edge pass and for other cockpit footage.

The film makers were allowed into some of the pilots-only conversations which are part of the film's narrative. The pilots may in some ways be larger than life, but the candid moments also show that they are human, which is part of the message that the Blue Angels try to convey.

The film was shot in 16mm because larger camera were virtually impossible to get into the aircraft, but the transfer to the big screen is solid.

Since "good reviews" are 75 to 300 words long, I will not tell the rest of the behind the scenes story, but I will recommend that all flying fans add this film to their DVD collection.