The Red Baron
I've noticed this movie on the shelves of my local Video Ezy a few times and finally gave it a viewing this past week. It's a 2008 German production filmed in English.
A rather disappointing effort, I'm sorry to say. Visually it's splendid, and the effects are excellent (as you'd expect these days) but are misapplied. They skipped some major aerial battles, including, of all things, von Richtofen's last and fatal flight. He's shown getting into his aircraft in a melancholy mood, as if aware of his impending doom, and then the film cuts to a visit to his grave by his fictional girlfriend (and by Roy Brown, the Canadian pilot often credited with downing him, though more recent analysis shows it was almost certainly an Australian soldier on the ground who fired the fatal bullet). That last fight was significant, not least because of his death; there was the fact that he'd apparently lost his usual alert caution and awareness of enemies around him, the confusion around who killed him, and the way he executed a perfect landing on enemy ground despite his fatal wound.
And while the movie seemed accurate in many ways, von Richtofen was portrayed as a brilliant pilot who preferred to shoot down enemy aircraft without (if possible) killing enemy pilots. In fact he was known as a brilliant marksman rather than pilot, whose main tactic was to aim at and kill the enemy pilot, as the surest way to bring them down. And the film had him growing more and more antiwar, even telling the Kaiser that Germany should surrender. He may well have been disenchanted with the slaughter, but nevertheless this smacks of putting a modern, "acceptable" gloss on his character, rather than showing the man for what he was: a patriot, a professional and a ruthless, supremely skilled combat pilot.
A rather disappointing effort, I'm sorry to say. Visually it's splendid, and the effects are excellent (as you'd expect these days) but are misapplied. They skipped some major aerial battles, including, of all things, von Richtofen's last and fatal flight. He's shown getting into his aircraft in a melancholy mood, as if aware of his impending doom, and then the film cuts to a visit to his grave by his fictional girlfriend (and by Roy Brown, the Canadian pilot often credited with downing him, though more recent analysis shows it was almost certainly an Australian soldier on the ground who fired the fatal bullet). That last fight was significant, not least because of his death; there was the fact that he'd apparently lost his usual alert caution and awareness of enemies around him, the confusion around who killed him, and the way he executed a perfect landing on enemy ground despite his fatal wound.
And while the movie seemed accurate in many ways, von Richtofen was portrayed as a brilliant pilot who preferred to shoot down enemy aircraft without (if possible) killing enemy pilots. In fact he was known as a brilliant marksman rather than pilot, whose main tactic was to aim at and kill the enemy pilot, as the surest way to bring them down. And the film had him growing more and more antiwar, even telling the Kaiser that Germany should surrender. He may well have been disenchanted with the slaughter, but nevertheless this smacks of putting a modern, "acceptable" gloss on his character, rather than showing the man for what he was: a patriot, a professional and a ruthless, supremely skilled combat pilot.