Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

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.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

With a budget in the region of £149m in today's money, Battle of Britain was a huge production with a galaxy of international stars. The aerial sequences are riveting, the action compelling. There isn't a great deal of character development and it is flat in parts, and the score is platitudinous, but this is a copper-bottom action film and Guy Hamilton was an accomplished technician and the man to turn to in this genre in the early 1970s. There's no getting away from the telling of events as they occurred and they had to honour the real pilots and ground staff who gave their lives to the cause, so it's laden with acton. The film is generally faithful to real events and it has a relatively upbeat tone given the subject matter which I suppose helps due to its 2hs 13mins length. No epic retellings should be of shorter duration. I'd avoided watching the film for years, probably because of what I 'd perceived as a grainy film stock but recent releases improve the quality and even so, I now think the dated feel adds to the spectacle.

Designed to commemorate Britain's finest hour, the film is badly let down by its poorly paced, badly written script. It has a great cast including Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Trevor Howard, Edward Fox, Susannah York, Michael Redgrave and Curd Jürgens but most of them either have too little screen time or subpar material so their talents are not used effectively. Bond veteran Guy Hamilton's direction is quite pedestrian. The flying scenes are spectacular but a great looking film with a bad script isn't worth much. Never in the field of human cinema has such a good cast been assembled for such a boring film.The few historical characters, particularly Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, are fairly well treated but the fictional ones are paper thin and poorly characterised. The Harveys' marital problems were given far too much attention. The subplot was uninteresting, melodramatic, clichéd, distracting and predictable. Speaking of historical characters, the real Dowding, who died only a few months after the film was released, visited the set during filming. Furthermore, Jürgens' character Baron von Richter is a thinly veiled version of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister and former Ambassador to the UK who was convicted of war crimes and executed in 1946. I fail to see why they could not have simply used von Ribbentrop as a character, particularly since it was specifically mentioned that von Richter spent several years in Britain. Several people who were directly involved in the battle such as the RAF flying ace Robert Stanford Tuck and his Luftwaffe counterpart (and postwar close friend) Adolf Galland acted as consultants but are not depicted as characters in the film, at least not directly. I watched the fascinating episode of "The World at War" (narrated by Olivier, incidentally) dealing with the battle a few days ago. Galland discusses it from the German perspective at some length and claimed that, even in 1940, he did not believe that Germany could have won the battle (without the support of the army and navy) in spite of the Luftwaffe's superior numbers in large part because they had only thirty minutes of fuel for each flight. He also said that he did not think that Operation Sea Lion had a serious chance of success, a view now shared by many historians.Overall, this is a very forgettable film about a hugely significant chapter in British and world history which should never be forgotten. I can't fault the film's intentions, only its execution. The film's heart was most assuredly in the right place but the material deserved a considerably better treatment. The only reason that it inspired any emotional reaction at all is that it was based on a real event with a high casualty rate. Bitterly disappointing.

There not much bad that can be said of all technical aspects involved in making such a film. The props ,costumes ,special effects ,The Planes and the combined lot take center stage in this brilliant UK produced spectacle!! The acting was well done there's zero Poorly spoken lines. Personally this movie was viewed by me twice it seems to follow historical correctness on a whole . I don't know how true all the various personal stories that weave there way throughout the entire movie are . However they are done tastefully and in Actual real life they are plausible . At the end of the movie when the credits are shown on screen the producers added statistics .Very Solemn moment. I don't know how your movie viewing goes , Thats in your hands . Personally I most always view credits from beginning to end .My movie experience becomes more fulfilling .

Michael Caine heads an all-star cast including Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Harry Andrews, and Sir Laurence Oliver as this Guy Hamilton directed film attempts to recreate the historical account of how the Royal Air Force(RAF) valiantly defended Britain from the Nazi air assault of 1940, which cost the lives of many fine airmen, as well as a huge number of civilian deaths along with Airplane and property destruction that cost England dearly, though which ultimately turned the tide against Hitler's Germany.Though the aerial dogfights between the RAF and Luftwaffe are impressively recreated, this film is otherwise disappointing, as it never creates an involving story with its characters, or any kind of compelling dramatic story, which is strange, since the potential was there. A good documentary on the subject may be more interesting and informative than this, unfortunately.