Born to fly (2023) – Watch to sleep

Genre:  Tech thriller

Platform: Amazon Prime

Length – 2 Hours 10 minutes

Director:  Xiaoshi Liu

 Plot:  In the South China Seas, “foreign” military planes with “English speaking” pilots regular enter Chinese airspace. The foreign pilots are challenged in English as per international law and they reply with “we will go wherever we want to”.  The most modern Chinese fighter cannot cope with these incursions as their technology is not up to those of the intruding stealth fighters. Lei Yu is selected for the test pilots’ school where his rival is Deng Fang. They have an able hard driving yet sympathetic commander. The rivals test one plane after another. Lei Yu is grounded because of some mistakes while Deng fang races ahead. Lei Yu is about to quit the program but the Commander says otherwise and takes him on an important test flight to test missile firing ….

The inspiration is clear. This is the Chinese equivalent of Top Gun. (One of these days, I am going to post about Top Gun – the film – copies worldwide). The jets are flown to the leading edge of their performance and the pilots mumble about engines not being okay.

True. China still has problems with its engines even though they are racing ahead with ever newer designs.

The commanders talk about “those difficult times when we were very backward and had to learn everything without the support of any foreign assistance. They went away and all our planes were just metallic junk’

Partially true. Which was redeemed later (wait for it).

The two rival pilots become fast friends and they get to test the holy of holies – their high end stealth fighter (labelled the J20 by the West). The stealth fighters are the ultimate in indigenous stealth technology. (Aha – now no one talks about difficult times as they were the result of some aggressive spying).

In the final fight between the English speaking pilots who still say ‘we will go wherever we want to go”, its not necessary to say how and where and against whom the duo test the stealth fighters it in real combat.

The above descriptions may sound very exciting. However, the film is hopelessly dull and like many “Asian” films – war or otherwise – everyone sheds buckets of tears when something bad happens. Hint Hint – who do you think will die, as I have already said that the rivals are finally cleared for combat with the brand-new stealth fighters and their engines?

The action is laughable. The heavy metal music is a clear imitation of Harold Faltermeyer’s rock style tracks for Top Gun. The acting is wooden and dull. Aircraft nerds – like yours truly – will have a boring time as most of the planes on ground are real. They are shown taking off and some lovely in flight visuals are there. But all the aggressive turns and maneuvers are done by a series of  bad VFX/ CGI. The flight patterns of the maneuvering jets are hopelessly unnatural (at least Top Gun had some great air to air / air to ground photography WITHOUT any/ minimal VFX).  Some of the stark landscape (Ladakh? Gobi Desert?) is shot beautifully.

Born to Fly? Naah. A nice sleeping pill.

Fun tip : Mute the sound and make your own Hindi / English / Marathi/ Tamil/ Indian language dialogues for fun.

Script – 2 out of 5

Story – 2 out of 5

Direction – 2 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

Total – 2.5 out of 5