When I see a movie, I'd like to be entertained.... For the purposes of entertainment, the Red Baron was absolutely horrible... 2+ hours of movie and less than 10 minutes of fight scenes in a movie about WWI.... Not that a movie needs fighting, or violence to be entertaining, but one would think that a movie using WWI aviation as a backdrop would have a little more action in it than that.
The real thing that was bad about the movie was the plot, and the script... HORRIBLE!!!! If you don't have a good foundation, you can't build a good house. The movie had no strategy, and no focus... Is this a movie about an ace who feels a sense of duty to his country???? Is it a story of a fighter pilot, who falls in love with his nurse??? Is it a story of friends bonding together during the worst war the human race had seen in history??? Is it a story about WWI Aviation???? Is is a story about a boy who dreamed of flying... Becoming an ace, becoming famous???? Instead of picking one of these plots and building a story around it, Nikolai Müllerschön decided to put all of that stuff into one mess of a movie...
There is no character development... None at all... to the extent that when one of the pilots is shot down, you could care less, because you haven't gotten to know them at all... In contrast, in the movie Wall-E, Pixar takes a whole 2 minutes to emotionally attach you to a freaking COCKROACH.... Seriously, Wall-E accidently runs over his only friend, this cockroach while he's coming back from his "job" of packing up trash... The entire theater gasped at the thought of a cockroach being ran over by a tank tread. In 2 minutes Pixar made an emotional connection the audience with a robot who doesn't speak, and an animated cockroach. Nikolai Müllerschön couldn't do that in a 2 hour movie using real actors...
As for the variety of aircraft and authenticity, that's great and all... but alas, if the movie sucks, I could care less about historical accuracy and the number of planes in the movie.... Script and Plot is what makes a good movie, not numbers and types of airplanes.... Blue Max, is a perfect example of that... Great movie, great actors, great script, and great plot.
Now, on to something good about the movie.... Pixomondo's work in the film is absolutely BRILLIANT.... They are the post production house who handled all the CGI effects for the movie... And I'm not just talking about the aircraft... Everything from recreating turn of the century Berlin, to the Fokker Factory, to the artillery lines firing into "no mans land"... There stuff is truly incredible and one place in the movie that really shines...
On a side note, CGI is very expensive to do for movies, and especially in a relatively low budget movie like this one, (I think it was around $25 million US) you have to be very picky about how the shots that you choose to use your dollars on. It puzzles me, about the stuff that Nikolai Müllerschön chose to have them do, and the stuff that was left out.... For instance, we see a couple of random dogfights throughout the movie, (most of the clips of those can be seen through the various trailers)... What puzzles me is that the major plot points are told to the audience instead of shown... i.e. When the Baron shoots down Hawker, all we see is him going up to hawkers downed plane, and cutting the serial number off for his collection... We see none of the fight, at all... And you also don't see the final fight.... just the nurse and
Roy Brown standing at his grave... Pretty lame... I would have spent my CGI dollars on my major plot points for big dogfights...
For the record, I think Flyboys was a bad movie too with a horrible script and bad plot that felt like it was the love child born from Von Richtofen and Brown, and Armageddon... We can only hope that Peter Jackson has something badass cooking up with his little mini WWI Airforce down in New Zealand....
That's my 25 cents on the Red Baron...
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