Why so much hype?

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The good parts - Peter Cushing, who cannot go wrong, and adds some much needed gravitas to the modern parts.The WW1 cast - perfect in every way.When the story is in WW1 - The English soldiers coolly wandering into a courtyard full of Germans is one of my favourites scenes.The scene with the sonic weapon - just believable (given Tesla's experiments) and nicely gruesome. Alex Hyde White isn't too bad once the story gets going.The bad The whole time travel. OK, I can see it working - but it doesn't here. It's just an excuse to modernise and Americanise the film, because god forbid an 80's audience try and deal with the story of British people in the past.Calling it Biggles - he's barely in it. Not enough to justify being the title character.That soundtrack. That truly awful, grating, inappropriate soundtrack.Marcus Gilbert - the one anomaly in the WW1 cast - he's awful.The modern American cast with the exception of Alex Hyde White - grating, irritating and stereotyped in every way.I think, on some level, the original writers and director did want to make a proper Biggles movie - the standard of the WW1 part shows that. I suspect they were over-ruled by producers and studio hacks who couldn't understand why anyone would want to watch just a straight forward story about brave British flyers in WW1. (The films penultimate line 'You're not a god, you're an American!' hints at some bitterness)Pity. There could have been a good film there.

I hate to quibble with a comment but I had to offer some follow up to the comment regarding the disbelief of a German secret weapon during World War I. The concept for a wave type weapon has its origins before World War I with Nicola Tesla, who first postulated the notion of what has become known as scalar waves. Modern physics denies that such waves can exist but Tesla was convinced that they did and according to some he provided it (Tesla Horwitzer). The British actually developed the first theoretic underpinnings for a sound weapon of the type depicted in Biggles and frankly I thought that is where the idea came from. We "moderns" think far to much of our capabilities. What is happening today is that some open minded scientists are revisiting discarded Victorian science. How many people know that the modern principles of William Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic principles are taught today in a truncated form and that the missing parts may in fact provide the theory for effective wave weapons (ever wonder why the US government spends so much time on Star Wars technology?). By the 1930s, the Germans were developing a number of secret weapons including the so called death rays. I think it prudent to give early modern humans credit for being just as creative as our generation and a lot more open minded.

**Spoiler warning** This movie is the very embodyment of what would happen when an eighties guy is transported back to WW1, commenting on things like nuclear weapons and punk hairdos to the bewilderment of the upper class gentlemens of the war. (I would have like to have seen all of the characters journey to the future, but that would be too much to ask^^).The best part of the movie, undoubtedly, is when Jim is transported into a nunnery wearing nothing but a towel and the nuns mistake him for Jesus -_- I would have to love to have known what was going through the boys' minds when they found him.A lot of people complain about the storyline but I think it's good and relevant. The only thing that irks me is that you never found out who went back and told the Germans to build the sound weapon and so altered time. That would have been a good thing - perhaps even if it was Stalhein himself when he was old.So, all in all, if you want a good time and a not-too-complicated storyline to have on in the background...get this.~~Lostoyannaya

I've read a lot of the reviews on here and there are some really negatives views of the filmOK so it is a bit tosh, cheesy, the music clashes and the storyline is a bit naff! i mean can a helicopters loudspeaker destroy a massive satellite dish?!?! but not taking anything away from a great film which i thought was thoroughly enjoyable! The music, if somewhat out of place is really catchy. especially the "do u wanna be a hero" song, the action is OK! i like the part when he's firing the machine gun at the Germans in the war, then zooms back to modern day and is shooting at the police! classic!Very enjoyable film i must say