Day 74 Blue Thunder (1983)

Science Ficton Thursday

We already talked about John Badam’s double feature partner “WarGames” earlier on the project. The director had two major summer movies open within a couple of weeks of each other. Both were big successes and fit the category of techno-thriller. It’s Science Fiction Thursday, but the stuff in this film was not so much speculative as it was just a little ahead of the game. The premise of this film is that an advanced helicopter is going to be used for nefarious purposes and the conspiracy is uncovered by a couple of cops on the LAPD Helicopter Division.

Roy Scheider is Murphy, a helicopter pilot with some PTSD and a chip on his shoulder. The helicopter nicknamed “Blue Thunder” is designed for anti terrorist activity during the LA Summer Olympics. The demonstration at an airfield shows that the weaponry is impressive, but also not as precisely targeted as you might want. To ramp up the drama, the military pilot overseeing the test is an antagonist of Frank Murphy from his service in Vietnam. Malcom Mcdowell is Colonel Cochrane and clearly is the a-hole. These two pros are great at building up the tension and there is a good degree of paranoia to be had with flashbacks and secret agendas all around.

The secondary characters are solid as well. Daniel Stern is Murphy’s partner, an observer who operates the surveillance tech on the test run. Warren Oates, in the last release film he made, is the standard police captain that the two cops work for. Candy Clark plays Murphy’s girlfriend and she is quirky enough to be interesting without having much to do except at the end. Anthony James, who bookends his career with parts in two Academy Award Best Picture “In the Heat of the Night” and “Unforgiven” has a small part as an assassin in the film.

The film doesn’t take long to get to get to the action. The plot unwind quickly so we know the players and their motivations. It is a little bi-polar however because on the one hand, the Blue Thunder helicopter is the threat. It’s advanced technology and weapons are potentially to be used against citizens. On the other hand, it is the tool that allows Murphy to uncover the conspiracy plot and thwart the bad guys in a battle across the LA skyline. In the end, it is clear that Frank is the good guy, and like all tools, the helicopter is not inherently evil, it simply depends on who is using it. While the conclusion of the film will justify including the movie on Will Walter’s podcast, it doesn’t solve the problem any more than a gun buyback solves crime. It just gives us something to feel good about.

I’m pretty sure we saw this in Hollywood, but I am not sure which theater we went to. This was a film we only saw the one time in a theater, but screened it many times on Select TV, cable, satellite and both VHS and Laserdisc. The version I watched today was a DVD-R burn of my Laserdisc. I copied a lot of my Laserdisc films so that I could share them with non-lasr owners, and in the eventuality of losing access to a functioning player. I thought it looked great.