alr

Blue Thunder

Screening on Film
Directed by John Badham.
With Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark.
US, 1983, 35mm, color, 109 min.
Print source: Swank

In Blue Thunder, paranoia of the 1970s meets the macho action film of the 1980s and anxieties that have only grown more pronounced since the film was made. Roy Scheider is a LAPD air-support division officer and a PTSD-inflicted Vietnam vet, charged with piloting a military-style combat helicopter. Equipped with infrared scanners, microphones, cameras, mobile telephone, VCR, and a local network-attached computer and modem, the helicopter was designed for enhanced municipal surveillance, due to fears of terrorist activity and civic disobedience during the 1984 Olympic games. In classic 1970s paranoid style, the government has more than everyday surveillance on its mind—and the true pleasure of Blue Thunder lies not only in its early anxieties regarding drone-style violence, but in its extensive areal action sequences. In these, Los Angeles becomes a spatially embodied version of the world in which we live; the film presents a state power that flies above and intrudes upon the networks through which we circulate, using technological control and datafication to turn us into its supplicants. 

Part of film series

Read more

Caught in the Net.
The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Música de Câmara. The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes

Read more

From the Harvard Film Archive Collection …

Read more

Chile Año Cero / Chile Year Zero

Read more

People and their Virtue. Two Films by Wang Bing

Read more

Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella

Read more

I Heard It Through the Grapevine with James Baldwin

Read more

Filmmaker, Guest Worker: Zelimir Zilnik’s Expatriates

Read more

Adachi Masao’s Revolution+1

Read more

Out of the Ashes – The US-ROK Security Alliance & the Emergence of South Korean Cinema