Ah, the ‘80s. It was a time when disbelief was much more easily suspended in movie theaters across America. That led to the Roy Scheider vehicle, Blue Thunder, making an impressive $42 million in 1983, doubling its budget thanks to a helicopter-based action plot that presaged Top Gun by combining a fighter pilot film with new helicopter and computer technology being developed in the early ’80s. It was a weird, in-between time when many neo-noir films like 8 Million Ways to Die and To Live and Die in LA were romanticizing the ex-military LAPD officers who dominated Hollywood-adjacent crime films of the rugged ’80s. Directors like Hal Ashby and William Friedkin and Blue Thunder director John Badham were trying out a style made famous by ’70s films like The French Connection, only with a much less cerebral — and more high-octane — approach.
For Badham’s action movie, that meant helicopter set pieces that hadn’t even been attempted in war films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon. Actually, helicopter stunts like this had never been attempted, full stop. There was suddenly a spate of ’80s action movies that incorporated technology into ultra-violent plots, with this particular Badham/Scheider enterprise doing so by melding one of the ’70s aging action stars (that being the enormously-talented former Jaws and All That Jazz star Scheider) into a Reagan-Era Police State movie with plenty of top-notch stuntwork and aerial cinematography at its disposal. It’s a sometimes-silly, totally implausible ’80s action film, but one that somehow works in spades thanks to Roy Scheider’s performance and some now-irresistible nostalgia for this daredevil era of death-defying feats on film.
Blue Thunder Is Perfectly Out-of-Date
Putting aside the corny score, Daniel Stern’s sometimes-awful comic relief, and some seriously outdated gender and race dynamics in the film — it was a hard-edged, explosive action film that combined vicious stunt scenes with a solid detective plot. Parts of Blue Thunder are way out-of-date, but that doesn’t stop the movie from being purely entertaining action cheese… in the best possible way.
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John Badham might be one of the most underrated directors of this era, having made generational films like Saturday Night Fever and the Cold War and technologically-driven fantasy WarGames. Blue Thunder did away with any global politics, however, opting for a plot about an FBI-driven program to police the 1984 L.A. Olympics with a completely badass, futuristic helicopter equipped with technology primed to sniff out a conspiratory plot… or, at the very least, spy on a woman doing naked yoga. Did we mention this was in the early ’80s?
Roy Scheider Gave a Classic Performance as Frank Murphy
Yeah, there are some pretty socially backward scenes in Blue Thunder, but maybe that makes it more appealing in this age, where even action films are expected to tame themselves for a younger audience, and stars like Scheider, known for their intense acting skills, are being replaced by paint-by-numbers actors lacking any duality. Scheider is simply sublime in Blue Thunder, unraveling a plot that threatens his girlfriend and her young son, and appeals to the audience by humanizing the hard-edged actor. He picks up right where he left off in Jaws, playing an officer of the law unwillingly caught in a situation only he can resolve, as the top pilot in the LAPD’s Air Support Division.
Supporting Scheider in the cast is Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange-fame, as the fed who hatches the evil plot that Scheider’s character, Frank Murphy, must untangle. His character was totally opposite Murphy, a perfect foil with a sinister disposition. It was also arthouse actor Warren Oates’s final film, and Candy Clark, a model-turned-actress known for American Graffiti, gives one of the best performances, including in a hyperbolic car chase scene where Frank Murphy guides her from his helicopter above.
John Badham Was Ahead of His Time with Blue Thunder’s Themes
Blue Thunder was also ahead of its time in its depiction of a Police State plot in Los Angeles, a city set ablaze 10 years later during the L.A. Riots — events that had much to do with over-policing of L.A.’s black communities. Speaking to this prescient plot, director Badham noted, “It was designed to be a glimpse into a paranoid’s future. A future where technology is not necessarily our friend, but a Pandora’s box of unforeseen and terrifying consequences. All the futuristic spying features of the Blue Thunder helicopter were actually either in online or beta testing stages by the military. Today we look back and see the beginnings of our total loss of privacy, and our early passive surrenders to a monster not yet named… the Internet.”
Based on the development of all this new technology, Badham tasked designer Mickey Michaels with making a helicopter that combined all this tech into a single super copter. Michaels used the already futuristic French helicopter, the Aerospatiale SA-341G Gazelle, and retrofitted weapons based on all this upcoming beta tech. The helicopter becomes the real star of the film, along with the explosive stunts. Scheider, Stern, and McDowell were all putting their own health at risk by actually going up in these helicopters to get epic shots while the stunt pilots performed crazy maneuvers with the actors onboard. The result is a film that shouldn’t be missed, especially if you long for the practical effects and locations of the ’80s Era. Stream Blue Thunder on Tubi.
