I think I remember reading somewhere that several former fighter pilots who flew in the battle of France, chief among them Paul Richey, actively tried to stop the series being shown, due to its highly controversial nature. Is this true?

Well, I’m looking forward to it, even if 99% of people on the forum are not. So what if it’s not an accurate description of the aerial battles of the First World War? So what if the Nieuports and Fokkers look as though they’re being flown by Luke Skywalker? It’s a Hollywood movie, not a Discovery Channel special!! So long as you remember that, where’s the problem? :rolleyes:

I’m totally with you on this Daz. From all that I’ve seen it’s exactly what I’d expect it to be, and despite that I’m GLAD they made it. Accept it for what it is, pure entertainment. “Hell’s Angels” for the 21st century. As it is, there is as yet no UK distribution deal. So most of us may not even get to see it anyway, until the day it arrives on digital versatile.

Seen the trailer and it hasn’t put me off going to see it when it comes out, I’m looking forward to it in fact. To those who see it as those bloody yanks winning the war all by themselves again, I say get over it. That’s always been Hollywoods’ way since 1945’s notorious entry “Objective Burma”, and most recently of course “U571”. It has to remembered that the Hollywood machine make these as entertainment to make lots of money for chiefly American audiences, who in the main know only what they’re told unless they are students of history and knowledgable of the facts.
Neither does it matter to me that it has a plane nose diving into a Zeppelin like something out of an old pulp magazine from the 30s. I’m glad it does.
Lastly, it’s got to be better than bloody “Gunbus”, right!

One BIG problem with “Pearl Harbor” is that it’s a movie with an identity crisis. What exactly did it want to be? A love story? A historical epic? or action movie? Take the attack for example. Divided into two halves the first half went to extraordinary lengths to be as accurate as possible based on the real life accounts of survivors. The second half throws away the history books altogether and choses to resemble a video game based loosely on the true life exploits of Lts George Welch and Kenneth Taylor. The whole movie is like that. It gets things right some of the time and completely wrong most of the time. It perpetuates the Americans’ belief that the Battle of Britain with mass German daylight bombing raids continued right up until their entry into the war when, in fact, during 1941 the RAF was on the offensive. What would have made more sense would be to have had Ben Affleck shot down while on bomber escort.
Something I found irritating is that the film company went to enormous lengths to trace genuine A6M Zeros rather than T6 rebuilds and then paint them incorrectly. With a brief to make the attack scenes as historically accurate as possible this oversight doesn’t so much defeat that object as shoot it in the head!
And finally, on a point of logic, how did the dyslexic Rafe Mcawley manage to write all those flowery love letters to his girlfriend, in between scrapping with Messerschmitts?

Seeing that picture of the mini SE5 from “You can’t win ’em all” reminded me of an old edition of “Clapperboard” from the 70s that covered the career of Derek Piggott. Lots of clips were shown, from “Blue Max”, “Darling Lili”, “Red Baron” and “You can’t win ’em all”, about which Derek talks about flying the aircraft through a fireball from an explosion set off on the ground and getting slightly cooked as a result.
A few years later I bought Derek’s autobiography “Delta Papa” where he talks about this incident some more. I remember the illustrations in the book too, including one of a burning “Fokker” on the ground from “Darling Lili” which left me determined to see this movie whenever it was to be shown on TV. I know critics panned it but I kinda liked it, despite all those tedious musical numbers.

In “Tora Tora Tora” one of the “Zeros” is practically scraping the deck with one wing low during the strafing of the fibreglass P40 replicas. An incredible piece of flying.