I have Battle Of Britain playing on the DVD now. It’s one of my favourite films. Spitfires, man! Hurricanes!
I happened by IMDB and found this review:
Good lord. ‘No plot’? Uh… You see, it’s an historical drama. The story is about the Bad Guys trying to defeat the Good Guys. The story follows the course of actual events.
But this yobbo dares to compare the aerial scenes in Battle Of Britain with those of Pearl Harbor? I’ve got news for him. The latter’s special effects were crap. They looked like computer-generated airplanes – which they were. The former’s aerial sequences looked as if they had real airplanes and were much more believable. Oh, that’s right. they were real airplanes! :smack: (And Tora! Tora! Tora! beats Pearl Harbor for story and aerial sequences as well.)
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, again I say this is one of my faves. Yes, the love story is hokey. But not nearly as bad as the one in Pearl Harbor. The stars of the show are the aircraft. There’s nothing like a Spitfire in flight. The radio-controlled Stukas were convincing. The Hispano-Suizas are as close as you can get to ME-109s without finding a Messerschmitt, and I (personally) can’t see the difference between the Casas and a real Heinkel. (I’ll have to take a closer look at the engines to see if they’re Merlins.) The scenes of Hurricanes being burned and Spitfires being bombed are frightening to an airplane lover. The mock-ups were very, very good for the most part.
The shots are set up typically for their time. But that’s okay. The more wide shots, the more airplanes! Some of the shots are a little tired though. How many times have you seen an airplane run into a fuel truck? Or one that busts into flames upon rolling over a small bomb crater? I suppose they were exciting 40 years ago. It really is a movie of its time.
Dated cinematography and sometimes uneven ground scenes aside, this is a ‘must-see’ for any fan of aviation or war cinema.
“Battle of Britain” wasn’t a great movie, really, but to suggest it was anything less than a hundred times better than “Pearl Harbor” is simply insane.
I mean, “Serenity” wasn’t a super sci-fi movie, but it’s still a thousand times better than “Battlefield Earth.” “You’ve Got Mail” was not a very inspired romantic comedy but it’s still genius compared to “Gigli.”
“Battle of Britain” was not hugely different, in many ways, from other spot-the-star WWII movies like “A Bridge Too Far” - they were simply big budget efforts to put a famous battle on screen and ended up being pretty by-the-numbers narrations, without a whole lot of inspiration or originality. Still they were better than the “Pearl Harbor” abortion (with the notable exception of “Midway,” which in its own way was just as awful as “Pearl Harbor.”)
[QUOTE=RickJay"Battle of Britain" was not hugely different, in many ways, from other spot-the-star WWII movies like “A Bridge Too Far”[/QUOTE]
True enough. That’s partly what I meant by its being ‘of its time’. Although I mentioned the style of the cinematography and the direction, ‘of its time’ also covers the period’s propensity for All Star Casts. Certainly it was no The Longest Day, nor did it have the power of George C. Scott’s performance in Patton.
Battle Of Britain may be mostly eye candy for aviation buffs like me. But it’s miles ahead of, say, 633 Squadron. (Sorry, 633squadron.) The only reason I own the latter is because it has Mosquitos in it – even if they used the same shots over and over. I thought the acting in Battle Of Britain was better, the story was better, and the cinematography and direction – in spite of being ‘of its time’ – was better. That, and the Spits and other aircraft get it on the One Of My Favourite Films list.
I agree with you on Midway. I really liked Tora! Tora! Tora!. We saw it with one of the pilots who flew in it. So I was excited when Midway was released. But it was obviously an attempt to capitalise on the success of Tora! Tora! Tora! and the cheesy love story sucked.
I’ve been watching some of the World War II. I really enjoyed Battle of Britain. I know nothing about airplanes and air combat, but I thought the movie was well done and enjoyed that there wasn’t a political agenda behind the movie. Plus, I enjoy a movie like this with good special effects, yet without the harrowing realism of a Saving Private Ryan.
One thing that bugged me about Battle of Britain was how whenever the German guy in the bright white uniform walked through the foreground during some outdoor banquet scene, I couldn’t see the subtitles because they were the same color as his clothes :smack:
Also, I don’t like that the DVD people went through the trouble of subtitling the French and Polish “chit-chat”, since in one scene it made a RAF pilot’s translating “for the benefit of the uneducated” (in reference to his friend standing next to him) redundant, and in the other scene (with the Polish pilots and their British instructor) I think the comedy was robbed from the scene by letting us know what the Poles were saying.
mobo95, that comment is rude, abusive, personally insulting and a violation of the rules of this forum. You will now go and read the Forum rules, especially Post #3.
In this forum, we discuss arts and entertainment. You may disagree with a particular point of view, but you may NOT insult another person for holding that point of view. People come to art/entertainment from different perspectives: someone who didn’t enjoy a movie because they just split up with their boyfried is entitled to that point of view, without ridicule or abuse. Someone who wept in a comedy because some humorous scene reminded them of their deceased mother is entitled to their point of view, without ridicule or abuse. Someone who didn’t enjoy a movie because the third reel was out of focus, or there were teenagers making noise behind him, is entitled to their point of view, again, without ridicule or abuse. Raguleader is entitled to complain that he couldn’t read the subtitles.
You, however, are NOT entitled to abuse or ridicule or attack him on account of it. After all those posts, you should know better. Shame on you.
My guess is that mobo85 was making a little Monty Pythonish joke about what the German was really saying during the banquet scene, when his subtitles were illegible. Maybe quotation marks around it would have helped.
I didn’t have any trouble reading the subtitles. First, there were very thin black outlines of each of the letters. Second, most of the text was within the letterbox bars.
I didn’t realise Ian McShane was was in the film. I never really noticed him until Deadwood.
I apologize. I was not insulting him. It was a reference to, and a direct quote from, a scene in Austin Powers in Goldmember about illegible subtitles, which I thought fit the subject at hand (and I thought was one of the few funny scenes in the film). If you mouse over it, you will get the whole message. I realize that it seems degrading at first, but that was the gag in the scene. Maybe I should have opened it with “This reminds me of the scene in…” Sorry again.
Heh, I read the daily update for this thread that I got in my email, so I saw the whole post without any of it being whited out, so I was puzzled, but not offended.
I remember being taken to see the planes lined up on the old RAF airfield at Bovingdon, where they were exhibited in aid of Service charities for a few days before being sold. The Ju87 replicas were there.
Didn’t mean a great deal at the time.
Parts of this film was made at the old Battle of Britain airfield of Duxford, just south of Cambridge. One scene in the film entailed the blowing-up a hanger. Duxford then became the air section of the Imperial War Museum ,and they had to spend a lot of money replacing this wrecked hanger to provide exhibition space. .
OK, mobo85, I accept and believe you – you’ve got a very clean record and it seemed kinda bizarre, so I have no prob with your explanation. Thanks. Sorry for leaping to conclusions, but… well, you can see why. I’ll erase this from your record, no one will ever see it again.
PS - It’s probably a good reminder to all of us to be careful about how jokes are expressed. I’m certainly not saying that we need smiley faces or anything, but a re-reading to see if it could be misunderstood is pro’lly a good idea.
