In light of the Christopher Nolan rumours, we take a look back at 1983’s Blue Thunder – a high-tech thriller that deserved more attention on its release.
It’s hard to pinpoint why the vehicular TV and film boom of the 1980s happened. Was it a coincidence that the likes of Knight Rider (1982), Firefox (also 1982), Blue Thunder (1983), Airwolf (1984) and Street Hawk (1985) all came out within a few years of each other?
Whatever the explanation, there was a brief period where vehicles got top billing, whether they were experimental planes (Firefox) helicopters (Blue Thunder, Airwolf), an ‘all-terrain attack motorcycle’ (Street Hawk) or Knight Rider (an artificially-intelligent car, the Knight Industries Two-Thousand, though the title could also refer to David Hasselhoff’s Michael Knight).
Blue Thunder – the original 1983 film, not the short-lived TV spin-off which emerged the following year – is arguably the best of the lot. An action thriller directed by John Badham, it was one of the most exciting movies of its type released in the early 1980s – and yet, for some reason, several high-profile critics were somewhat dismissive of it. Although not an outright failure, Blue Thunder wasn’t a hit with cinema-going audiences, either.
Perhaps because, leaving its high-tech helicopter aside, Blue Thunder’s a bit of a throwback to the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. Roy Scheider stars as Frank Murphy, a traumatised ex-Vietnam pilot who now flies helicopters for the Los Angeles police. He’s handed the keys to the Blue Thunder – the first in what could potentially become a fleet of new-generation police helicopters which, although armed with a gigantic machine gun on the front, is particularly handy for surveillance. It’s equipped with infrared cameras, powerful microphones, and a ‘whisper’ mode which means it can hover outside a building without being detected (unless, of course, an occupant opens a curtain).
Already alarmed by what the helicopter represents, Murphy soon learns that the military – as represented by an old nemesis from his ‘Nam days, Malcolm McDowell’s slippery Colonel Cochrane – plans to use it for even darker ends than he’d initially feared.
Blue Thunder has a few crossovers with RoboCop, which came out in 1987. Both are police thrillers with a sci-fi edge; both feature a lead character named Murphy, and both feature an appearance by Mario Machado as a news anchor. But where RoboCop was violently outrageous and bitingly funny, Blue Thunder is less bloody and far more modest, with much of its antics familiar from other cop thrillers of its vintage – the grouchy boss (Warren Oates, terrific in his last screen appearance), the doomed rookie sidekick (a pre-Home Alone Daniel Stern).
The mayhem of Blue Thunder’s third act action sequence, on the other hand, looks strikingly modern. It’s a lengthy set-piece that takes in a car chase on the ground, Murphy fending off attacks from two fighter jets in the sky, all building up to a final, aerial confrontation between the hero and MacDowell’s antagonist in a military helicopter.
To this day, Blue Thunder’s aerial scenes look stunning, and it’s slightly mind-boggling that Badham and his crew were even allowed to have helicopters barreling above and around Los Angeles streets. Top Gun may have been prized for its aerial sequences three years later, but much of that was shot over seas or above stretches of barren landscape.
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It’s worth remembering, too, just how heavy photographic equipment was in the 1980s; several shots of Scheider at the the helm of his helicopter were captured by a photographer simply strapped to the side of the craft with makeshift harnesses, bulky camera in tow. At one stage, cameraman Frank Holgate felt his harness start to give, and the pilot had to lean over and grab him before he plummeted to the ground. In all the chaos, John Badham – also in the helicopter at the time – grabbed Holgate’s camera and continued filming, while Schneider was forced to temporarily take over the chopper’s controls.
Badham’s direction isn’t necessarily flashy, then, but it’s propulsive and exciting, barrelling along thanks to Edward Abroms and Frank Morriss’s editing. Badham and cinematographer John A Alonzo really know how to sell the Blue Thunder as a powerful machine with presence – the first time we see it fly into view, it comes hurtling out of the rising sun like the warbirds in Apocalypse Now. When Candy Clarke’s plucky Kate gets cornered by the cops, Murphy’s grand entrance – his helicopter hovering up from beneath a bridge, dead centre of the frame – is unspeakably cool.
In reality, the Blue Thunder was essentially a kit-bashed Aerospatiale Gazelle, its modified shell designed by Mickey Michaels. Although it looks agile enough in the finished film, the craft was so laden down with lights, CRT screens, that gigantic machine gun and other props, that it became cumbersome and difficult to fly. The cohesion between direction, effects and production design is such that, certainly in the 1980s, you could buy into the idea that the Blue Thunder was a real helicopter rather than a sophisticated prop. In the context of the film, it absolutely looks like the kind of menacing, vaguely insectoid attack helicopter the military would have turned out in the Reagan era.
Put all of this together, and you have a set of practically-made action sequences you simply wouldn’t see in a 21st century movie. Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine a film crew being allowed to have helicopters flying around city streets in quite the same way again.
One fan of Blue Thunder, at least according to recent rumours, is Christopher Nolan. The story goes that his currently unannounced 2026 film is a tech thriller inspired by Blue Thunder in some way, and that Nolan has even given members of his production copies of the film to watch in preparation.
That rumour, like so many others about Nolan’s antics, might prove to be wide of the mark. But look again at his Bat sequences in The Dark Knight Rises, and it’s easy to believe that Nolan may have had Blue Thunder in the back of his mind as he was shooting it. Those shots of the Caped Crusader’s flying machine – all harsh angles like the Blue Thunder helicopter – hurtling around Gotham streets certainly look a lot like Badham’s movie. There are shots in which the Bat weaves to avoid exocet missiles, which then slam into the side of a skyscraper, which look distinctly familiar. Nolan even combines aerial action with a chase on the ground in The Dark Knight Rises, just like Badham did in Blue Thunder.
Like Badham’s helicopter, Nolan’s Bat was physically built, though unlike the Blue Thunder it couldn’t actually fly – instead, it was sent swooping around Pittsburgh (standing in for Gotham) with a mixture of cables and cranes. Even Nolan’s commitment to in-camera effects didn’t extend to making an actual, functioning flying machine he could have piloted around city streets.
It’s possible that the parallels between Blue Thunder and The Dark Knight Rises are simply a coincidence. Nor can we confirm whether Nolan is indeed attempting to make some sort of homage to Badham’s film. Whatever the truth is, the latest rumours might at least prompt a new generation to track down one of the 1980s’ most underrated action thrillers.
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