Benedito Dias Rodrigues After leaves U.S. Navy Admiral Jonatham L Scott reminder in flashback your career since World War I until World War II and your fight to developing news aircraft carrier that will be in near future the main force in kind of war about to come....semi-documentary movie hosted by Gary Cooper...but there an interesting twist in half of movie black and white for color mainly because have to use color footage from that time....however an interesting movie as study historic events!!!

Robert J. Maxwell Gary Cooper is an admiral retiring from the US Navy. He solemnly closes his suitcase and turns to leave his ship, an aircraft carrier. The officers are at attention as he walks across the deck. He boards the gig and heads for shore. Then his narrative begins: "It doesn't seem like twenty-seven years ago that I first flew an airplane off the Langley --" And so it goes. The voices of Cooper and one or two other principals carry us through a kind of Classic Comics illustration of the development of naval aviation, from the first fragile and clumsy biplanes wheeling around on the flight deck of the USS Langley in the 1920s to an overflight of jet fighters as Cooper and his wife, Jane Wyatt, stand on the pier, staring proudly up at them as they zoom overhead.A familiar structure. It's like Jimmy Stewart growing up with the organization in "The FBI Story," a promo for J. Edgar Hoover, President-for-Life. And it was used by John Ford in "The Wings of Eagles," although there was more robust humor and a lot of distraction was provided by a drunken wife. The role of wife in "Task Force" is less challenging and of no importance whatever. She's there to tell him how proud she is of his successes, to comfort him when he's sad, and to talk common sense to him when he's so frustrated he's ready to quit the Navy. (Usually it's the other way around, with the wife jealous of her husband's being "married to the Navy.") There's a straw man -- a viciously anti-military editor who rails against expensive investments like aircraft carriers, even after the battle of Midway, when everyone down to the lowliest swabby recognized that the war in the Pacific depended on carriers. The guy should leave his brain to the Smithsonian. Julie London in a small role is yummy, with startling eyes and a nose by Praxitiles.The movie gives us a sense of the passage of time. The footage of the Langley in the 20s morphs into the modern carriers of World War II and the shooting changes from black and white to color. There's a good deal of interspersed combat footage, most of it familiar, beginning with Greg Toland's reenactment of the precipitating event in "Pearl Harbor". Flaming airplanes fall apart in the air. A wounded American aviator has his Hellcat torn in half during a crash landing. A stricken carrier sends up a ball of vermilion fire. The same airplane crashes two times, maybe three, with the negative flipped. If I see that same Japanese fighter trailing fire and smoke and skipping along a few dozen feet above the sea before doing a sudden nose dive, I think I'll scream. Forty millimeter guns pound away. Officers sit and sweat out the battles while the score imitates a clock with a Thump thump Thump thump beat.The battles aren't really described in any detail, and the detail that's provided always makes our side look good, which is to be expected. References are made to Midway, the Phillipine Sea, and Okinawa. (Kamikazes at Okinawa caused more casualties among Navy personnel than were suffered by the Army ashore.) One genuinely brave and self-sacrificing aviator is named among all the fictional character, McCluskey, but he isn't given the right role. Wayne Morris, an actor of little discernible talent, plays another aviator. In real life he'd actually put his rear end on the line playing a Naval aviator during the war. The editing is only a little sloppy. An F4F landing suddenly morphs into a TBF, then back again, but that doesn't happen very often, and the canopy of the hopelessly obsolete TBD Devastator is accurately pictured.The whole movie, from beginning to end, amounts to a promotional ad for Naval aviation. Gary Cooper is the central figure but he's only there to guide us along through the progression of things and events, a kind of patient and explanatory Virgil taking us through a specular gray world that sometimes turns hellish.It isn't a bad movie. I always enjoy movies about aviation and the Navy. But, as far as I could tell, there was only a single original touch in the script. Cooper's ship has been torpedoed and his best friend killed on the bridge below, and when Cooper touches the chest-high steel shield to look down at the body, the metal is so hot that he winces and quickly withdraws his hands. It would have been nice if there had been more such delicate and personal touches.

Randy Young I first saw this movie late one night when I couldn't sleep. For those of us that study the history of military aviation, this movie is a God-send! The "between wars" US military had a dismal understanding of aviation. And this film shows what Naval aviators had to contend with. The film depicts, correctly, the backward "John Paul Jones" thinking of the Naval brass at the time. The film covers some 20 years but does it very well. Gary Cooper plays the role of a Naval aviator better than he plays most of his roles. And seeing Walter Brennen as a Navy admiral was different. I grew up watching him as "Grandpa McCoy." Aside from the "movie" stuff, the film is a very good history lesson. Most people can't believe that we had one of the worst air fleets in the world during the inter-war period. And it was because of the 19th century thinking of the senior brass. But for airplane nuts like myself, seeing the old Boeing F4B's, Curtiss Goshawks and Grumman F2F's and F3F's actually in the air was the most wonderful part of the movie. If you get a chance to see it, do so.

btillman63 As someone who knows a great deal about naval aviation history, I give "Task Force" high marks for accuracy and atmosphere. The central event is the 1942 Battle of Midway, which is SO much better than the egregious 1976 film. The attention to detail in TF is about 900% better than "Midway", with far better characterization to boot.