You need to learn the difference between a well-written film that's aimed at kids or teens and a poorly written one. One difference is that the well-written film never uses "this was made for teens" as a cop-out for poor filmmaking because it never has to.

Also, understand the methods of moviemaking - even when you have a "target audience", your goal in most films that cost over a certain amount of money is to make the film accessible to as many people as possible. There aren't enough black teenagers in this country to justify a square focus of a film that costs even _this_ much on their demographic, without regard for whether or not the material would have crossover appeal to other demographics. That's why all of your Disney and DreamWorks films are loaded with jokes that none of the small children these films are ostensibly aimed at will get, and also why they are cross-marketed at times in "adult" outlets (read: talk shows, major articles in NYT, Entertainment Weekly, and such).

I still highly doubt Lucas truly had black teenagers as his target audience unless he envisioned himself as one, because, yes, as you said earlier, he did have old-fashioned war movies in mind when he made this film. But even a beginning filmmaker will tell you what worked (barely) in 1947 is not likely to work in 2012 (well, 2010). Second, there are _very_ few black teens who would sit through a patriotic old-fashioned war film unprompted.

Red Tails was promoted on Cartoon Network and not The Hurt Locker because one is a general entertainment piece in wide release, and the other was limited release Oscar bait.

And that cop-out still doesn't excuse the poor writing. It's not just simple or made to be easily digestible; it is poor. It's not an overanalysis, and I'm not just "some MF on a message board" either. I've barely scraped the surface of why the film is poor (the film lacks depth, so why should I?) I've spent more words arguing with people about why poor films do not deserve our praise and countering excuses for bad films than I have _talking about the actual picture itself_.