I wasn't expecting a
"Battle if Britain" (1969) or
Tora, Tora, Tora style semi-documentary...but I was expecting more than what was on the screen.
After rave reviews over on the Key Publishing forum, I was a bit underwhelmed.
You don't see vast crowds of men, you see a few bombs drop but only from one He 111 at a time. And you never see the German army closing in. In fact, Aside from the first few scenes, I'm not sure you even see a German.
What you do get are long lines of men stretching across the peaceful looking beach and docks.
Perhaps the director planned it to look like that to give it a surreal quality, but one could say it looks like the producers didn't want to hire many re extras.
As you'd expect from soldiers, the lines were orderly, but I thought they looked a bit too orderly, looking more like a line waiting to get into a hit film or waiting for the next i-gadget to be released.
Another surprise was aside from the middle-aged man who pilots his small boat to rescue soldiers, you don't get much insight into the "star" soldiers or Spitfire pilots. Again, that may have been the director's choice, he wanted to emphasize that the rescue wasn't necessary about saving individual men and more about saving the army as a whole. Still, that approach may surprise some...you're not going to get deeply involved with people.
As noted elsewhere, the He 111s and Stukas are by necessity CGI, so we're left with three Spitfires and apparently one Merlin powered "Bf 109".
Much of the aerial action I'd shown from the pilot's point of view. That gives an excellent view of the three dimensional aspect of aerial combat and how difficult it is to shoot at an enemy...I've never seen it done better.
What you don't get is a melee of opposing fighters or the aerial "ballet" scenes you got in
The Battle of Britain and that may disappoint some.
On a technical level, you get many shots looking forward from a camera mounted on the "Spitfire's" fuselage...but anyone who has seen a Spitfire will notice the cowl and exhaust stubs don't look anywhere near correct. Apparently, the producers mounted the camera on some other aircraft. One wonders with today's technology, why they didn't mount a camera on a real Spitfire...since many, if not most...have been re-skinned, they would have been damaging the airframe's authenticity.
It's a fine film and I'm sure it gets across the points the director wanted to make, just don't expect an "epic" with a vast scale like you saw in
The Longest Day or
A Bridge Too Far.
If you're a WWII history buff (or if you even stayed awake in history class) you'll note the length the writer's go to to give historical background on the battle for today's audiences. Still, it's not as blatant a George Clooney's character telling FDR about the status of the war in the beginning of
The Monument Men"....somehow I would think that FDR knew that Germans controlled Europe.
Over on the UK forum, many there love the film because they say it's finally a UK-centric WWII film without Americans.
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