Blue Thunder

This is for the Mill Creek Blu-ray release. I haven't seen this movie for many years, so decided to get a physical media copy.The story follows a Los Angeles police officer in the helicopter air support division. He is also a Vietnam Veteran with a history of PTSD. He's been asked to test an experimental new helicopter nicknamed Blue Thunder. This new helicopter has the latest in surveillance equipment, stealth capabilities and heavy armament. Not long after the test, he learns that the helicopter will actually be used to monitor and control US civilians. A councilwoman was going to blow the whistle and she was murdered for it. Now, the officer is in the crosshairs, so he fights to get the evidence to the media and to keep the Blue Thunder prototype away from those in charge.The movie is a very enjoyable action flick. It's well made and pretty realistic in a number of ways. Best performances are by Roy Scheider as the hero and Malcolm McDowell as the villain. The battle scenes are really great and exciting. The Blue Thunder helicopter is also the real standout star of the movie. There are also generous yet well placed humorous scenes that balance everything out.The only downside is the Blu-ray release itself. There is a lot of grain during the night sequences, but the rest is fine. There are also no special features on the disc whatsoever. There aren't even any subtitles, audio options or a Chapter Select. It's a shame when a production company can't be bothered to put together a decent package for an otherwise enjoyable film. The package is the only reason that this package isn't getting a full five stars.I would recommend this film for those who like 80's action films and police/ law enforcement heroes.

I'm the 110th person to give this film Five Stars and the 194th person to review it.I forgot how much I loved this movie. I saw it in theatres in a third run discount theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and so loved the movie. I love it even more now.This film has just enough plot to keep us interested but not enough to whet our appetite. For instance, what were the Hispanic men trying to accomplish when they waylaid councilwoman McNeely in Brentwood? How were the police notified so quickly? The cruisers arrived almost immediately after the assault began! I've called the police myself in nice neighborhoods and it took 10 minutes for the bastards to arrive. These cops were on the scene like they'd been teleported there. What were the criminals trying to do? They clearly were not hit men and they were not attempting to rape her as was reported in the film. And had they been hit men they would have slain her immediately and not roughed her up to the point where she screamed for help and drew attention to herself and the ongoing crime. Hit men would have used a sound suppressed pistol to kill her and yet that's not what was done. These guys did nothing but get themselves killed for no reason (They Accomplished Nothing). The film offers vague allusions as to some secret cadre of government officials wanting to start riots so as to have Blue Thunder's capabilities demonstrated. Unfortunately this is not explored too much in the film. Despite this I enjoyed the film and was surprised by a plot element that was revealed at the end of the film during one of Frank Murphy's flashbacks while engaged in aerial combat.The aerial photography in this film was incredible! It had aerial chases galore as well as good old fashioned ground car chases. This makes the film unique for the time period. The fact that there was little computer generated imagery (F-16's Notwithstanding) in the film appealed to me. It is ironic that the technology depicted in this film is now available to us all at the consumer level! In the 1980s it was all cutting edge. Today it is par for the course gear that we all take for granted.Frank Murphy was a realistic character. He's a man we admire who suffers from PTSD. He seems to be a loner except that his girlfriend Candy comes back into his life and brings joy along with angst. She's the everyday lady next door raising a ten-year-old boy. I liked their on again off again relationship but I really loved the loyalty they showed to one another. If only every guy could have a woman like her.I won't go too much into the storyline. Others have done a better job at that. I will say this, however. If you like Airwolf and Blue Thunder I recommend this DVD highly. This edition is in print but is fill screen. The widescreen special edition is out of print. If you can find it, buy it. Otherwise you will have to make due with the full screen version. I'd love to see a remake of this film.A. Nathaniel Wallace, Jr.

BOTTOM LINE: Been a fan of this film since it first splashed across cineplex screens. I've owned it on tape, two different DVDs version and now this Blu-ray. BLUE THUNDER is a solid action film, thrilling and highly entertaining from start to finish. Roy Scheider is excellent as is the rest of the cast. I enjoy revisiting this movie every so often, like an old friend. The audio/video improvements in this new 1080p format make it a recommended upgrade. This spiffy new BLUE THUNDER Blu scores a solid 4 STARS from me.THE STORY: U.S. government develops a highly-specialized prototype helicopter gunship, nick-named Blue Thunder. The copter sports impressive firepower, is heavily armored and loaded to the rotors with all manner of high-tech, stealthy surveillance gizmos. It is assigned to Los Angeles police department's Astro Division to test its real-world capabilities, in anticipation of using it to possibly quell unrest & potential trouble during the upcoming 1984 Summer Olympics. Loner pilot Frank Murphy (Roy Scheider) draws the short straw and together with his newly-assigned partner Richard Lymangood, (a young, gangly Daniel Stern), the duo takes to the skies. Soon afterward, Murphy uncovers a sinister plot by a handful of corrupt government officials within the Blue Thunder program to turn the super-duper chopper into an unchallenged master of the not-so-friendly skies. When these creeps discover that Murphy knows, (a terrific "Oh, crap!" moment), he suddenly becomes Target Number One.THOUGHTS: Lifting off in early summer of 1983, BLUE THUNDER is a slick allegory about Big Brother-type evils, a too powerful government and advanced technology getting ahead of our ability to use it properly and ethically. Rough-edged everyman actor Roy Schieder is perfectly cast here as Vietnam vet Frank Murphy, an idealistic but world-weary (and slightly damaged) man still suffering bouts of post traumatic stress disorder due to some deeply disturbing events he experienced while serving in 'Nam. Despite his desire to live a normal life the horrors of war are never far from his mind, often haunting the tortured ex-soldier in his dreams. Frank has few he can call friends. Among them are the Chief of the Astro Division (the late, great Warren Oates, in his last screen role), a mean as a snake, tough as saddle leather type who takes no crap but has a genuine soft spot for Murphy. Cute-as-a-button Candy Clark is Frank's ditzy, off-again/on-again girlfriend. New to the fold as Murphy's eyes & ears while aboard Blue Thunder, Daniel Stern's turn as Lymangood is a joy as he brings a genuine, earnest, goggle-eyed and eager to please energy to the role. You like him almost immediately. Lymangood, ("JAFO" to the boys in Astro), also brings a valuable skill set to the table, making him an integral part of the narrative and not just a shell or red herring. Rounding out the cast as Frank's nemesis (and old war "buddy"), is Malcolm McDowell as callus retired Army colonel F.E. Cochrane. McDowell crafts a smug, slimy, unhinged, slick & irritating character in Cochrane. Seriously, you just want to kick this guy in the nuts every time he's on screen.F/X-wise, the full-scale Blue Thunder chopper itself is pretty impressive but sadly outdated in today's real world of ultra-sophisticated gunships like the Apache & Cobra, and their Super versions. Still at the time this came out, it was a cool yet also frightening concept: something that could blow away most anything in the air and at the same time be capable of silently hovering undetected outside your window and stealthily recording everything you say & do. Big Brother in the air? Scary stuff - and rather prophetic. (Although the airborne eyes & ears that we must contend with and worry about today are tiny remote-controlled drones rather than huge manned gunships.) The movie's SFX miniatures look good but the optical composite work is rather lacking; (the shots of the Air Force jets are kinda lame). They work well enough to service the story, and if you've gotten into the movie and are rooting for Frank during the film's tense, climactic airborne confrontation then the jet F/X wonkiness won't even matter.THE BLU-RAY: Mill Creek gives us a really nice quality transfer. The movie has never looked or sounded better than it does on this Blu-ray, but be advised that this disc has ZERO extra features. If you've got the Special Edition DVD then you'll want to hang onto it for the bonus content. Even without the goodies, this Blu-ray is worth the double-dip for the improved video & audio.

Saw this on video years ago - great flying, but looking back on it now it's a bit ridiculous. The action take place over a city with people going about their lives whilst a helicopter has missiles fired at it by jets - which hits a new build skyscraper the shots one of them down with the pilot landing near a freeway - then gets machine gunned by another helicopter - all this with apparently no civilian casualties - bit 'A-Team'.The Blu-ray copy is fine packaging is German, but film and documentaries in English.However the cast and helicopter flying is good - this film did lead to 2 spin offs - Blue Thunder and the now possibly better remembered Air-Wolf.

The 80s was the golden age of action movies, and Blue Thunder still holds up as one of the most enjoyable. Part of a Summer double whammy from director John Badham that also saw him scoring a big hit with WarGames, it's another piece of paranoia turned into slick entertainment as Roy Scheider's Vietnam vet with a bad case of flashbackitis (otherwise known as Clint Eastwood Firefoxitis) gets reassigned from flying police choppers to testing out a new crowd control weapon - the heavily armed state of the art helicopter of the title. With 1984 literally just around the corner and fully equipped with computer-controlled gun systems, high-tech listening devices that can hear a mouse fart at 2000 feet and infrared cameras that see through walls, it's clearly intended for more than just crowd control at the Los Angeles Olympics, which isn't exactly a surprise since Malcolm McDowell's old wartime adversary is behind the program.Naturally Scheider uncovers their real, albeit vaguely defined dastardly plot and uses the weapon against them, with some especially spectacular results as helicopters duel over the city in scenes that are all the more impressive for being done largely for real. No CGi here and surprisingly few model shots too, just terrific stunt work excitingly edited. The Blue Thunder itself is a striking creation, first seen blotting out the rising sun like a malignant insect, the film clearly enjoying showing off its tricks and firepower as much as it pays lip-service to abhorring its purpose. The plotting may be rudimentary and the characters one step up from cardboard, but the film manages to sell them effectively enough to never quite allow them to be completely overshadowed by the hardware thanks to solid performances, with particularly good supporting turns from Daniel Stern as Scheider's rookie observer and a wonderful swansong from Warren Oates as his eloquently sarcastic boss (the film, co-produced by The Wild Bunch's Phil Feldman, even has a rather sweet dedication to him `for all the joy you gave us').It did inspire a dismal short-lived TV series that missed the point of the film and turned the Blue Thunder into a `good guy,' though the film itself was changed substantially from Dan Jakoby and Dan O'Bannon's original script. Closer to Taxi Driver with multi-million dollar firepower, that saw Scheider's psychotic character genuinely going crazy and shooting up the city, but the studio wanted the destruction without the high body count of innocent bystanders - it's one of the finished film's absurdities that for all the destruction only the villain gets hurt - turning him circuitously into the film's hero instead, borrowing more than a few plot points from the previous year's Firefox along the way while thankfully improving on Eastwood's film. The rather decent documentary on the special edition DVD AND Blu-ray goes into that in surprisingly frank detail, with O'Bannon even talking about the commercial reasons for his taking first billing on a screenplay largely written by Jakoby - with Alien just released and O'Bannon too ill to work full time, they could get a better deal with his name first. It's certainly a lot more informative than the vintage 1983 puff piece for the film that's also included and which has unfortunately been letterboxed from its original fullframe. The DVD special edition also includes three storyboard sequences that aren't on the Blu-ray, while the Blu-ray includes the original theatrical trailer, which isn't on the DVD special edition but was on the otherwise barebones original DVD release.Unfortunately the picture quality on Columbia's special edition DVD isn't any visible improvement over their earlier issue, with the same rather light blacks and limited depth: it's an acceptable widescreen transfer, but if it weren't for the new extras it wouldn't be worth the effort. However, the Blu-ray is a distinct step up in quality.

Blue Thunder is a 1983 action thriller film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Gordon Carroll, Phil Feldman, and Andrew Fogelson and directed by John Badham. The film features a high-tech helicopter of the same name and stars Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, Daniel Stern, and Malcolm McDowell.A good action thriller which still holds up today with all the CCTV and Internet surveillance in today's world will leave you to ask which side you are on.

Its from the early eighties so it was filmed the good old fashioned way with real stunts, real explosions and none of these rubbishy CGI cheats.Roy Scheider plays a hotdog helicopter pilot for the police department who has been tasked with testing out a new super helicopter.He uncovers a secret plot and is framed for murdering his partner to keep him quiet.It doesn't work as you might expect.Great action and a very decent cast.Bluray is excellent picture and sound quality and some of the documentary extras are very good too.

Great action and concept strong 1983 film, good extras enjoyable purchase.