The Rocketeer

How come his legs don't get fried to a crisp?

There’s some­thing appeal­ing about jet packs. Whilst the tech­nol­ogy doesn’t quite seem to have arrived at the sci­ence fic­tion utopia of peo­ple jet­ting through the air to their work­place, or cops swoop­ing down from the skies to sur­prise a crim­i­nal scum­bag as he runs off down the street with a stolen hand­bag, jet packs still fire the imag­i­na­tion. They put us into the boots of fan­tas­ti­cal god-like heroes such as Super­man. Why should he have all the fun?

With Cap­tain Amer­ica out this week­end (in the UK), now’s a good time to revisit Joe Johnston’s first attempt at a slice of World War 2 action adven­ture. Strictly speak­ing, it’s set before WW2 begins, in the year 1938. But Ger­many and the Nazi party looms large in the background.

Sadly, Jen­nifer Con­nelly never gets as naked as her comic counterpart

Billy Camp­bell is the oddly named Cliff Sec­ord, a pilot who makes his liv­ing by per­form­ing aero­plane stunts at air­shows. After some gang­sters shoot up his plane, and he barely escapes with his life, he later dis­cov­ers they’ve hid­den an exper­i­men­tal rocket pack in the air­field where he works.

A rocket pack invented by none other than Howard Hughes (played by none other than John Locke from Lost!), and stolen on the orders of Neville Sin­clair, an Errol Flynn style Hol­ly­wood actor played with scene steal­ing flair by Tim­o­thy Dal­ton.

For Sec­ord, the lure of strap­ping the rocket pack to his back and tak­ing to the skies proves too hard to resist. Not least the idea that it could make him and his bud­dies a lot of money for their debt rid­den airfield.

That’s the thing about the Rock­e­teer. He doesn’t start out as a hero. He’s essen­tially an ordi­nary Joe, with a knack for fly­ing, who just wants enough money to get by, and spend time with his girl­friend, the ever lovely Jen­nifer Con­nelly.

But when Sec­ord decides on the spur of the moment to use the rocket pack to res­cue some­one in dire peril, kind of an old fash­ioned lit­tle cheer went up inside me. He races across the air­field to retrieve his bor­rowed tech. It’s the birth of a hero. And not one born of van­ity. Some­body has to do some­thing quickly. He has the tools to do it. And so he does it.

The fly­ing scenes that fol­low don’t dis­ap­point. They have real oomph. I could almost smell the rocket fuel as Sec­ord blasts through the sky. The Rock­e­teer roars past the screen like, well, a rocket. There’s some nice look­ing wide shots too, where we see the twin rock­ets burn­ing bright in the dis­tance, before Sec­ord is pro­pelled into a screen jud­der­ing close up.

Despite being a pretty good pilot, he’s never in full con­trol of his new-found tech­nol­ogy. He’s learn­ing all the time, the rocket pack cut­ting out at cru­cial moments. Land­ings too, are fraught with dan­ger, and never less than bumpy.

All of this goes some way to explain­ing why The Rock­e­teer was orig­i­nally envi­sioned as a tril­ogy. If it hadn’t been a huge flop, I get the feel­ing that the later films would have seen a more con­fi­dent Rock­e­teer, plunged head­long into World War 2 and all man­ner of excit­ing adven­tures. Indeed, a Nazi pro­pa­ganda film part­way through hints at some­thing darker, and more epic to come.

And as for the rocket pack utopia? Well, give me a rocket pack, and I would prob­a­bly just use it to fly low down inner city streets, knock­ing the hats off traf­fic war­dens. Pretty heroic, in my book.