That’s the ‘Just fly the damn plane’ Firefox, of course. I’m not sure if I actually want to watch it again, though. You know how it is: the movies that were important when you were young don’t always hold up.
Plus, it turned out that Soviet materials science was horrible. Big shocker, there…
Speaking of Soviet materials science, P.J. O’Rourke – curses upon him for not dying ten years sooner before his inherent evil was revealed – was capable of much humor:
“Commies love concrete, but they don’t know how to make it. Concrete is a mixture of cement, gravel and straw? No? Gravel, water and wood pulp? Water, potatoes and lard?”
Even cooler than Iron Eagle.
(The fact that I can say that with a straight face probably says something about my age.)
IIRC, the movie was panned even back at the time.
I’ve read the book it was based on. My recollection was that it was a decent book.
In any case, sure, the idea of the Soviets being able to build a plane like this was silly. But the same applied to the Red October. And we actually got a good movie out of that. Plus, it was the Cold War. No one had any idea what the Soviets were or were not really capable of. And that led to the amusing story of the development of the F-15, which happened because the West saw the MiG-25, completely misunderstood its role and capabilities based on an imperfect understanding of the design, freaked out as a result, and decided “Well if the Soviets can build that, we need to do better.” And did.
Also, the ATF program that would result in the F-22 (and F-23) was only four years away when the novel was published. So the stealth aspect of the fictional plane was something that was being considered at the time in the West. We had to assume that the Soviets had capabilities similar to our own.