There’s something oddly satisfying about a good old-fashioned Hollywood flop. The film industry is built on displays of hubris and overspending that could only happen through a combination of studio drama, artistic ego, and undistilled chaos (and also probably cocaine.) But we mostly remember the true disasters, those movies so entertainingly bad that they become beloved relics. Consider Battlefield Earth, Gods of Egypt, or Cats. The majority of the most financially disastrous films in cinematic history are, alas, rather dull. Sorry to John Carter, Town & Country, and How Do You Know. And these films aren’t usually objects of mystery. We know how their messes came to be. Still, it is intriguing to me how so many of these movies, which left massive holes in Hollywood chequebooks across the industry and helped to shape the blockbuster future, have been so easily forgotten. Case in point, today’s subject.
I’m going to make a bold assumption and say that the vast majority of you reading this piece have never seen Stealth. It turns 20 this month, and you probably won’t see a lot of nostalgic think-pieces on it. It stars an Oscar winner, scenes were shot on an aircraft carrier, and it had a prime Summer release date. You probably know even less about what a catastrophic financial disaster it was. This is a flop that would be legendary had anyone remembered this movie existed. From a $135 million budget, Stealth grossed $79.3 million worldwide. Its reported losses of $155 million, adjusted for inflation, beat the flops of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Moonfall, and The Matrix Resurrections.
Stealth is a clear Top Gun wannabe with a sci-fi slant. It’s a military action flick focused on three pilots (Jessica Biel, Josh Lucas, and Jamie Foxx) who are recruited by the U.S. Navy to help develop an advanced new aircraft with artificial intelligence capabilities known as the Extreme Deep Invader, or EDI for short (insert ‘that sounds like a sex toy’ jokes here.) After EDI is struck by lightning, it begins learning at an accelerated pace and decides it knows better about how to make ethically tricky choices than humans. That mostly means it wants to bomb everyone. It’s up to the attractive but thinly developed human trio to stop the evil plane.
2005 was not exactly a liminal period for Hollywood, but one with intense change in the air. The blockbuster had moved away from muscled men with guns towards genre-heavy fare with big sequel potential, like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Superhero movies weren’t in abundance or consistently strong in terms of quality but titles like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man were pulling in big bucks, while Christopher Nolan’s reboot of Batman was about to bring prestige to the genre. Movie stars still mattered too, like Will Smith, Tom Cruise, and Angelina Jolie.
So, it’s not hard to see why Sony/Columbia Pictures logo picked up this spec script in 2002 and flung so much money at it. Director Rob Cohen had recently made The Fast and the Furious and xXx, but was several years away from his masterpiece, Hurricane Heist. He had solid action chops for a flick like this. Befitting Hollywood’s mutually beneficial relationship with the U.S. Military, the production was able to shoot on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. Shooting also took place in Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. The soundtrack included the most achingly 2005 selection of artists, from Incubus and Kasabian to will.i.am.
And the film is super effing dull. It’s no dang fun, which is just insulting when you’re trying to offer us a Top Gun rip-off with an evil plane. Top Gun is not a deftly layered character study, but it is full of immensely charismatic actors with great chemistry. Biel, Foxx, and Lucas have been great in other things, but they’ve nothing to work with here (although you will get a brief pre-The Bear appearance from Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Because she’s the only lady of the group, Biel’s character is, of course, heavily sexualized and has a romantic subplot with her male colleague. Never mind the lack of chemistry. Just let Josh Lucas take photos of her in a bikini, then become the damsel in distress.
In his hilarious review, Roger Ebert said the movie was ‘an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code […] Here is a movie with the nerve to discuss a computer brain “like a quantum sponge” while violating Newton’s Laws of Motion.’ And it is, indeed, a very dumb film. That would be excusable if the film played around with its own ludicrousness. Let EDI be the conniving villain like HAL 9000 or something. Instead, he flies around bombing Asia while blasting nu-metal that it illegally downloaded, and it’s oddly po-faced. And yes, the geopolitics of this film are messy as all hell, as they typically are in works like this, but it’s especially insulting to see the U.S. military in the midst of its so-called War on Terror portrayed as the moral centre versus the evil computer they created.
Truly, there isn’t much to talk about here. Stealth is badly made, witless, derivative, and sorely out of date. Even the director admitted the movie was ‘not fun’, especially when compared to his prior Summer blockbuster work. None of that even makes it interesting in terms of bad movies. That, obviously, makes my job difficult, but it does represent how often these expensive bombs are rooted less in glorious madness than mundane financial planning. Many films have questionably large budgets that aren’t evident on the screen. They’re derivative because a studio head wanted to replicate another film’s organic success. Enough Yes men telling you the idea will work, will make an impact. Besides, plenty of bad movies make money. Why not this one?
But Stealth is far more representative of Hollywood hubris than something like Jupiter Ascending or Joker: Folie a Deux. Playing it achingly safe, believing you’ve got a surefire win on your hand because you’re working on rails, is a likely path toward mediocrity. That only works on audiences if there’s a bigger hook, like a familiar IP or beloved actor helming the evil plane. We’ve less patience for something so bland that it cannot justify its own existence. At the very least, let the villainous AI plane have better taste in music.
