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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

WARBIRDS: The Movie

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

This weekend I watched the Sci Fi Saturday film "Warbirds". There are a lot of things I could say about this film, sadly very few of them are positive. I will give fairly high marks for the computer animation of the "dragons", but nothing else about this film rates a single positive comment.

To say that there was no one with any effective knowledge of the weapons and equipment anywhere near this production would be to suggest that anyone in this production cared. Any effort to that end would have, apparently, detracted from the underlying "message" of the film.

There may have been a good film, somewhere, in this movie, but they kept it well hidden among the drek and message.

Even the fairly good computer generation of the "dragons" was wasted because that apparently used all of the "effects" budget. The M1 carbines that were used were not adapted to firing blanks, so rather than firing a shot every time the trigger was pulled, the actor had to pull the bolt back and release it after each shot so that he could fire another. A lot of scenes (involving the .45 pistols) were apparently done on the basis of the actor firing one "dramatic shot" in the scene, so the actor was only given one cartridge. This gave quite a few instances of an actor firing one shot with his .45 and having the slide lock back, i.e., the weapon was empty after firing that one shot.

Beyond that, there were so many things that were just "wrong" about the whole set up it was ridiculous. Bombers on "ferry flights" (that is to say the bomber is being flown someplace to be handed over to an active flight crew) are not loaded down with ammunition. Particularly if there are no "gunners" aboard the bomber (there is no point in having the weight of all those bullets if there is no one to work the guns). The Nuclear Weapons that were used on Japan were both far larger than the "bomb" shown in the plane's "bomb bay", and no one took off with an active nuclear weapon. (The bombs dropped on Japan were "armed in flight", i.e., after the plane had departed the base.) No one would arm a nuclear bomb prior to its being dispatched on its mission. While the bomber might have been ferrying a bomb, it would not have been capable of detonating as shown in the film.

And those only scrape the surface of things that were just wrong. There was also a great deal of whitewashing of Imperial Japan in this film.

This is not a film I will ever watch again and I regret having watched it at all.