Wow. Genuinely wow! That is one of the most awful movie reviews I have ever read. No. It is singularly the worst I have ever read.
And no, my view is not because of the “sacrilege” of saying he did not like Battle of Britain – frankly I couldn’t give a toss who likes it or who hates it because each to their own.
No, I just can’t believe some of the bilge this guy has written – it’s like he is desperate to show how clever he is but the comments he makes vary between the dumb and the really dumb.
Of all the insults to our intelligence in "The Battle of Britain," perhaps the very worst is when Michael Caine's dog looks wistfully up into the sky and whines for his master to return. We are asked to applaud heroism because of the discomfort it causes dogs. There was hardly a wet eye in the house.
This is a truly awful start – and I’m not even a dog lover…. The British generally are animal lovers and this scene, if one is so inclined, causes a bit of a stiff upper lip moment. Personally I can take it or leave it, but one thing I am confident of – the film makers are not asking me to acknowledge and applaud heroism because it leaves sundry canines owner less. What a puerile comment.
"Battle of Britain," in fact, is a throwback to those phony war movies of the 1940s. Remember the obligatory scene of the dashing young pilots lounging around the officers' club? Suddenly the attack alarm sounds, and they all dash out into the night, leaving the fire burning and a few chairs overturned. The faithful old servant moves slowly through the room, adjusting chairs, and then the roar of airplanes is heard overhead as our boys fly off to engage the Hun. The servant takes a half-empty pint of beer from a table, lifts it to toast the heroes, and softly says: "Here's to You, sir!"
To its credit, "The Battle of Britain" eliminates this scene.
Okay… so one up to the BoB apparently… but what is actually so wrong about that “obligatory” scene anyway?
Now the author of this bilge really starts to lose the plot:
But it catalogs (?) all the others:
The pilot staring moodily out the hotel window while his girl looks pensive on the bed;
Yes you are right. Personally I would never watch a war film with such a ridiculous scene.
Churchill, represented by a cigar;
**** me really?! I mean seriously? BoB shows Churchill complete with cigar! That’s outrageous. Why wasn’t his personage appropriately reflected – you know dressed in his favourite pink tank top while smoking a pipe?
the Kid who gets killed on his first mission;
Er news flash. The average age of a RAF pilot was 20 – the youngest was 18. The life expectancy was four weeks. The training time was cut to meet the need for more pilots. As the Japanese found, the less hours in an aircraft, the more chance you’re not going to see another sun rise….. Why is showing a couple of youngsters failing to return from their first mission so wrong? It told a sad truth. It happened. But according to this idiot, that cannot be shown in a war film because of what and why exactly?
the brave little Red Cross nurse;
My mum was a very green 21-year old when she was sent to Australia to nurse the sick and wounded in the Pacific. Showing the courage of a nurse in a war film? Yeah, don’t know why the film makers would have done such a thing. Shocking.
the outcast officer whose early warnings are vindicated;
Cos that never happens does it? No matter the film, no matter the genre, the wisened, experienced person helping to explain the plot through his own previous experience just doesn’t happen – or shouldn’t. The fact it happens in BoB truly confirms this as a rubbish film. Or does it confirm the reviewer as someone who doesn't actually know what he's blabbing on about because its a well used method to bring the audience up to date with the plot?
the officious German general;
The point is? The officious German general – and what about the pompous British officer trying to teach the Poles (who of course need no teaching)? They are characters.
the Nazi pilots drinking champagne
Yes, the German pilots who had grown confident, and battle experienced, in success after success in Spain, Poland, the Low Countries and now France. The champagne perhaps a metaphor for the total and utter confidence that the young Luftwaffe pilots had at the start of the battle?
while the harried British gulp tea and make repairs.
We drink a lot of tea. Sorry and all that. But we do. Sorry that is a crime I know. Re the repairs have a look at German “efforts” to get damaged aircraft back in service and compare that with the British……
And interminable shots of airplanes being shot down.
Yes – it’s a ****ing war film. And here's an absolute shocker. Many people who go to watch war films, go to see war based action. They go to watch aircraft porn, battleship filth and downright naughty panzers. I know right? Who knew?
The airplanes are another sore point. Sure, Harry Saltzman spent millions to assemble and repair Spitfires and Hurricanes, and there was even a TV special about the authenticity of the movie. But you've got to USE airplanes; it isn't enough to own them. Some of the aerial photography is very good. We see dogfights actually filmed in the air and fought by real planes (instead of by models and visual effects).
Right so a positive yes?
But the aerial scenes are allowed to run forever and repeat themselves shamelessly, until we're sure we saw that same Heinkel dive into the sea (sorry -- the "drink") three times already. And the special effects aren't all that good for a movie that cost $12,000,000.
Yes that is true. It takes a few watches but when first watching the film – or maybe the first few even, one doesn’t necessarily realise they are the same shots from different angles. Shame the budget wasn’t bigger but that’s real life.
For example: We see hundreds of German bombers, row after row, thundering across the sky to bomb London. But every one of the bombers moves at precisely the same speed, There's no relative change in position, or correcting for altitude. Nobody even dips a wing. The Germans were good, but they weren't that good.
So what? You now sound like a nerd because you want to impress us with your formation flying knowledge. But exactly how many people did those few seconds of celluloid spoil the film for? Compare that to more modern films with bigger budgets where aircraft are flying off in all impossible directions and angles…..
And so the scene looks fishy, and we figure out we're looking at models. No progress has been made since that notorious scene in "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), where the Dunkirk fleet churned across the English Channel at exactly the same speed (rowboats, gunboats, it didn't matter) and you realized they were being towed through a tank on the same string.
Same again – it was hardly a deal breaker….
Inept as a lot of the effects are, they look good compared to the plot, or story, or whatever it is. Despite a lot of impressive speechmaking, no attempt is made to explain and clarify the Battle of Britain. Strategy is confined to pushing symbols around on maps. There are so many characters we never get involved. We can't even keep them straight. The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.
Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez. What is possibly not possible to understand about the film? The Germans have won the Battle for France, the Battle for Britain is about to begin - that is all explained. Its also explained about how the Germans are preparing for invasion and we get little vignettes with Curt Jurgens and Ralph Richardson in Switzerland – plus speeches by Laurence Olivier (Dowding) to explain further e.g. the rate at which the young Allied pilots needed to shoot down their German opposite numbers, the mistake that was turning on London etc. I mean genuinely where did you get lost in this massively complex story line??????
There's also evidence that the movie was butchered in the editing. Several scenes seem to lead into or out of other scenes that aren't there. For example, after Susannah York learns that Christopher Plummer has been shot down in flames, there's one of those obligatory scenes intended only to telegraph an outcome. She sees a badly burned man and is lectured on plastic surgery and all that. So we're set up for her dramatic confrontation with Plummer, which never comes. We never see either one of them again, in fact.
Ever heard of less is more? We know what has happened to the Canadian pilot, we know that his and his wife’s life will never be the same again. Leaving it at that is a way of dealing with that episode. Yes they could have dealt with it head on. The fact they didn’t doesn’t make it a bad film.
All we're left with is the offensive publicity campaign. It may be necessary to remind ourselves that the movie is not the battle itself. That TV documentary seemed to hint that Harry Saltzman, the producer, was only slightly less heroic than the guys who flew in the battle. They only died. He had to buy the planes.
Offensive? Yeah whatever…..the only thing offensive is your review - well no its not offensive, its just rubbish.