Speaking of the movie (I did not read the book), I’d say Robinsons best effort is the characters developed. At times, I’d say he over-did them a bit, but that is to be expected from a fictional book.
Funny thing these fighter pilots…I’ve gone thru a number of books like u all have as well. The last one I read was one of the more interesting ones. He seemed to have kept some of that “youthful sense” when writing. He didn’t seem to “forget” the bad parts of it all and he didn’t tone down his rethorics and language when he wrote. Probably because his thoughts were never intended for publishing in the first place. My point is that the fighter pilots may have reacted a bit too harshly when the movie/book came out. There’s a difference between a 20 year old in a Spitfire and a 60 year old telling the stories afterwords. Those 40 years inbetween have most likely shaped the person more then he would like to admit. He’s not 20 anymore, he’s 60 and tells the stories accordingly. Some stories comes across as the 1940’s version of Motley Crue’s The Dirt while others are so toned down you would imagine there’s a senior citizen flying a Spitfire, highly shaped by the moral society of not admitting to the youthful adventures of the past.
But Robinson over-did the characters to get the message across. IMO that is. None of them portrayed a chap like Tuck, Johnson or Bader. They all portrayed a different stereotype character IMO, and over-done. But again, this is fictional.
As for the movie…the “scenery” of it all…
The actors looks like the come from…well..the late 80’s. They’re too old too. The real deal were younger. That chap from Dark Blue World..the youngster..now that’s more like it. But at least it was better than a god knows how old Christopher Plummer in BoB.
The Spitfires are there because;
A) They had too few Hurris
B) They had no CGI
CGI could have helped a lot. After watching it all in a little marathon, I just got the feeling I had seen Spits taking off and landing for hours. 😀
Piece of cake would have been lovely as a year 2015 production, all with state of the art CGI. Imagine the action scenes. The sky is the limit.
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