Devotion

The roar of a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine isn’t just a sound; it’s a physical vibration that threatens to rattle the fillings right out of your teeth. In J.D. Dillard’s Devotion, that sound serves as a constant, low-frequency reminder of the sheer mechanical violence required to keep a Corsair in the air. While 2022 was dominated by the high-octane, sun-drenched glamor of Top Gun: Maverick, Devotion arrived in its wake like a cold front—darker, heavier, and far more interested in the psychological cost of the flight suit than the adrenaline of the dogfight.

I watched this film on a Tuesday evening while intermittently distracted by a stubborn hangnail and the fact that my radiator was making a clanking sound almost identical to a failing landing gear. Strangely, the domestic annoyance only heightened the film's grounded, unglamorous depiction of 1950s naval life. This isn't a recruitment poster; it’s a funeral dirge played at 30,000 feet.

The Shadow of the Successor

Released during a peak moment of "franchise fatigue," Devotion faced an uphill battle that had nothing to do with its quality. It’s a $90 million historical epic about the "Forgotten War" (Korea) that hit theaters just as audiences were finishing their third or fourth helpings of Glen Powell’s other 2022 pilot persona, Hangman. But where Maverick was a celebration of legacy, Devotion is an interrogation of it.

Glen Powell, playing Tom Hudner, trades his smug grin for a mask of stoic uncertainty. Opposite him is Jonathan Majors as Jesse Brown, the first Black aviator to complete the Navy's basic flight training program. The chemistry here isn’t built on barroom banter; it’s built on the heavy, often silent recognition of what it means to be a "wingman" when one of you carries a burden the other can barely conceive. In our current era of heightened discourse around representation, Dillard handles Brown’s struggle with a quiet, devastating hand. He doesn't give us many scenes of overt, cinematic villainy; instead, we see the exhausting, everyday friction of a man who has to be twice as good just to be seen as half as worthy.

Gravity and Grime

From an action standpoint, Devotion understands that clarity is more impactful than chaos. Dillard—who previously directed the lean, clever Sleight—eschews the "shaky-cam" nonsense that plagued so many early 2010s action flicks. Instead, he and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (known for his clinical, sharp work on Mank and Mindhunter) opt for a perspective that feels anchored. When the planes dive, you feel the G-force in the framing.

The aerial sequences were filmed using actual vintage aircraft—Bearcats and Corsairs—and that practical reality shines through. There is a specific, oily texture to the flight deck of the USS Leyte that CGI simply cannot replicate. You can practically smell the JP-4 fuel and the salt air. Devotion is essentially a high-budget indie drama that happens to have some of the most stressful carrier landing sequences ever filmed. The stakes here aren't about saving the world; they’re about the terrifyingly thin margin between a perfect landing and a ball of fire on a pitching deck.

The Sound of Silence

The score by Chanda Dancy deserves its own column. In a decade where many action scores have devolved into generic "braam" sounds and percussion loops, Dancy uses sweeping, mournful strings that evoke the loneliness of the cockpit. It’s an intense, somber aural landscape that matches the film's refusal to offer easy catharsis.

The film's third act shifts from the blue skies of the Mediterranean to the frozen, jagged hell of the Chosin Reservoir. The color palette drains away, leaving only the stark whites of the snow and the deep, bruising blues of the sky. It’s here that the "Dark/Intense" label really earns its keep. The violence is sudden and unglamorous. When metal hits ground, it doesn't just explode in a pretty orange fireball; it crumples and screams.

Jonathan Majors delivers a performance that, in retrospect, feels even more weighted by the actor's subsequent real-world headlines, but within the vacuum of the film, his Jesse Brown is a masterpiece of internal tension. There’s a scene where he looks into a mirror and hurls every racial epithet he’s ever heard back at himself—a ritual to harden his heart before a flight. It is deeply uncomfortable to watch, and it’s exactly the kind of raw, psychological grit that separates this from your standard "Greatest Generation" hagiography.

Why It Vanished

Why did this movie make only $20 million against such a massive budget? You could blame the marketing, which struggled to differentiate it from Top Gun, or perhaps the audience wasn't ready for a war movie that ends on such a haunting, unresolved note. In the streaming era, Devotion feels like the kind of film that will eventually find its cult following on a random rainy Sunday when someone stumbles across it on a digital library. It’s a "Dad Movie" with a soul-crushing twist, a technical marvel that cares more about the man in the machine than the machine itself.

It’s a film that demands your attention not through spectacle, but through the sheer gravity of its central friendship. It asks what we owe to the people who fly beside us, and whether "devotion" is a gift or a heavy, heavy burden.

Devotion is a rare bird in the contemporary landscape: a big-budget, mid-range drama that treats its audience like adults. It skips the easy cheers in favor of a long, hard look at the cost of heroism in a country that wasn't yet ready to love its heroes back. While the pacing occasionally drags in its middle hour, the final sequence in the snow is some of the most moving, gut-wrenching filmmaking you’ll see this side of the millennium. See it on the biggest screen you can find, if only to hear those engines roar one last time.