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Simply A Masterpiece

Powerful

Great Film overall

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

I have always wanted to know of the real experiences of the WW2 Battle of Britain fighter pilots and here is one of the best presentations of one man's personal experiences. His story is beautifully dramatised, with some great air fights and on the ground the boredom, the fears as well as the good times. What the movie does best is convey the men's struggle to keep going when utterly exhausted and facing the possibility of death at any time. It's an intimate study and I believe a truthful one. The pilot Geoffrey "Boy" Wellum was still alive at the time of the making of the movie (because he was only a teenager when he first flew) and in voiceover reflects on those days. His final words are heart-breaking. Was it all worth it? To complement this film, a wonderful history of the Battle of Britain is in an episode of Battlefield Britain presented by Peter and Dan Snow on BBC DVD.

Some of the comments in the other reviews for this movie are laughable. One buffoon, decrying its failure to remake the Battle of Britain movie even thinks Wellum is a fictional character and that it was an actor playing the part of a fictional old fellow looking back.This is an excellent production all round. Because Geoff Wellum was involved in the production, I would think its a pretty accurate version of events. It shows a side of the Battle of Britain that is glossed over in other movies: the constant stress, fear and grief that the pilots suffered. Wellum was only 18 when posted to 92 Squadron. He had never even flown a Spitfire. He had to ask his ground crew chief to show him how to start the engine for his first flight! Yet he could have been sent up to fight immediately, had his squadron leader not made sure he was kept off ops until he at least racked up a few hours of flying time.All the cast put in excellent performances. The aircraft are a joy. The flying scenes are much better than others allege, too, although this is about the PEOPLE more than the aircraft. It is thoroughly worth watching.

I wasn't really taken with this-we've seen it all before, done better elsewhere, when the vintage aircraft necessary to put the flying sequences together weren't quite so scarce (or valuable), and there was less reliance on SFX-the world has become a poorer place since the introduction of CGI. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what was missing from this production. The lead character, while not simply two-dimensional, gave nothing to quicken the blood. Even the 'scramble' scenes seemed slow and plodding, as though the actors were simply doing it by the numbers. Some of the action footage was unforgivably bad (as has been pointed out elsewhere, some of it was pinched from other films), and there was little in the way of back-story or characterization. The film wasn't improved by punctuation from the (fictional) lead character as an old man, analyzing his attitudes and feelings at the time... It was rather as though the cast felt as exhausted and bone-weary as the boys felt in 1941...All in all, I should say turn off the TV, and enjoy a good book like 'Sigh for a Merlin', or, re-watch one of the classics like "Battle of Britain" or even "633 Squadron", which convey that sense of urgency and derring-do far more convincingly-one last thing, another reviewer here has questioned whether the sound footage was really the real McCoy: I concur, a Merlin has a much denser, richer, raucous sound-these were obviously piston engines, possibly Merlin Is, but more likely Kestrels or Goshawks.

very old school TV movie, slow pacing, contemplative bio pic of spitfire pilots during ww2. nothing we haven't seen or heard before and other than this is the story of from one mans point of view one wonders why this story needs to be told again and in this way. stiff upper lip, British heroes and bad bad Germans, it's like noting has changed in how we tell stories so we're left with a remake of what a TV movie about ww2 spitfire pilots might look like in the 50's or 60's. The good news is the spitfires look fantastic. I'm assuming some of them are CGI and they're really well done. In the old days these would be real but it's impossible to tell so well done to the fx and props crew.This film was OK, nothing more than a Sunday afternoon TV movie, but with the amount of films being made today perhaps we do have a right to expect something better.