Much to my dismay, the movie starts out in high gear – no character development, it does not interweave nor invoke the concurrent dynamic history of the times thus no moral teaching or practical lesson, no accounts of how the men fought to prove their individual and collective intelligence to fly, no accounts of the heartaches, setbacks and scrub outs and why – I mean who was Joe “Lightning” Little and what drove his propensity to his daring air maneuvers, who was the air squadron commander and what were the pressures that drove his relationship with the bottle, who were Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terence Howard and what purpose(s) did they serve – What value did they add to the “movie”? Some nameless, faceless people could have played those parts. I won’t try and enumerate all the deficiencies; I think you get the picture.

Yet as all Hollywood movies of this type never fail to do is include the Black man’s “insatiable desire” for the white woman, depict predictable racial aggravations with ensuing confrontation along racial lines where only the Black man is to blame and is incarcerated, kill the hero and bestow posthumous honor.

While “witnessing” this shallow and hollow “plot” of a “movie”, it reminded me that Black folks can’t rely on and should reject self-appointed white protagonists’ (e.g. Tim Wise, George Lucas, Bill Maher, et.al. of the like) efforts to tell our story, speak to our struggles and/or speak on our behalf formally or informally and why they are incapable of doing so. There is a distinctive conflict of interests whereas the white protagonists set out to ingratiate and patronize in contrast to Black folks’ diametrical expectations of absolute truth, substance and fulfillment – none of which ever happens. Because as true to the white protagonists’ biological reality invariably proves, with the aid of de facto “Negro leaders” who have bought into the dominant society’s culture, when it comes to Black folks, the white protagonists’ in their self-serving, mass-marketable dramatizations, avoid the arduous, aggravating task of telling Black America’s story and sell us a raw deal and “down the river” every time.