The Pilot

The 105 min runtime felt much longer with the long dragged out and unnecessary scenes. The slow pacing made it even worse. There was very little suspense, or anything that would really make you care to invest watching it. The romance part was cheesy, and the survival part kinda lame. This would've been better off as a documentary, and no more than 60 minutes long. The performances were decent and mostly convincing, but the cinematography was the standout feature, as it was excellent. It's a very generous 6/10 from me.

I found the English voice overs hard to listen to. I changed the language to Russian and added English subtitles. After making that change, I enjoyed the movie.

Watching "The Pilot" was a pleasure, first because of the quality of the air combat scenes, very well filmed. Another highlight is the editing of the film, which streamlined a predictable story, but which catches our attention. I liked!!

This was made before the invasion of Ukraine, not propaganda, not made by or for Putin. Many Americans don't understand about Russia and WWII. They sustained horrendous losses, something like 20 million, compared to 400,000 for the US. A lot of it was fought in their own country after the Nazis invaded. As a result the war is more deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. US WW-2 movies are about soldiers doing brave things far from home. Russians were defending their own cities where they had homes, family and sweethearts. Pilots were the best of the best, and in the film he flies and Ilyushin-II, an armored close ground support aircraft. It was a great plane, an entirely Soviet design, and they were proud of it. It was ideal for the kind of fighting they were doing. The film shows it getting hit hard repeatedly before it came down, and this was realistic. It was a heavily armored, very tough plane.

First up, this movie was made long before the invasion of Ukraine and anyone who thinks this was made as propaganda for that invasion needs to stop with the delusional thinking.

As usual, this WWII movie is superbly made, with great cinematography and superb aerial effects. I really wasn't sure if they had real aircraft or CGI a lot of the time, that's how good the aerial scenes are.

The leads play their roles well and the story is quite inspiring, not dissimilar to the Douglas Bader story for the British in WWII.

Well worth a viewing. Watch the Russian audio with subtitles, not a dubbed version. Why anyone watches dubbed movies is a mystery!