Tom Cruise’s determination to put his life in danger to carry out the most enormous action scenes of the last decade, that engine of “The need for speed” that was the motto of his ‘Top Gun’ brought to reality, is a fascinating phenomenon. What drives someone to attempt to pull off potentially kamikaze or unrealizable featsand with no glory guaranteed at the end?
Interestingly, that last question has been explored by one of the greatest filmmakers ever in a film focused on aviation. Before his great samples of epic cinema with ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ or ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, and after working as an editor for the Michael Powell Y Emeric Pressburgera David Lee we could see him take flight with ‘the sound barrier‘, a remarkable British film that we can watch on Netflix.
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full speed passion
Lean directs a script by the playwright Terence Rattiganon a pair of pilots determined to reach the speed of sound with a revolutionary plane. Behind the feat is a rich owner, who developed cutting-edge technology for World War II, who encourages test pilots to his crazy company, including the fiancé of his daughter.
The tensions are evident, and the drama is developed with the elegance and good hand that would be characteristic of the filmmaker’s work. But what really stands out about this impressive film is that passion for capturing the art of aviationpartly inherited from his aforementioned period with The Archers, which is shot and presented with incredible rigor and exquisite visual craftsmanship.
Wanting to honor the incredible advances made in aviation, Lean did extensive research on supersonic aircraft, chatting with aeronautical engineers to gain insight into the ins and outs of the craft that was later passed on to Rattigan. That is why, in many respects, the flight sequences are excellently conceived and executedalmost done in a documentary way.
‘The sound barrier’: flight into the unknown
This formidable realism, at the same time as a remarkable and remarkable exercise for the time, allows us introduce us to the anguished and extreme scenario in which these pilots find themselves. The dramatic scenes manage to have an interesting weight because we know the real danger of flight situations, which can take off and launch without knowing without being able to land safely.
They weren’t counting on the jaw-dropping jaw-dropping trailers in ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ but this classic exercise has its own kind of showmanship that’s still going strong today. A great classic film where David Lean already showed signs of his masteryand that is a good piece to rescue these days of aeronautical hype derived from Tom Cruise.
