Hindenburg: L'ultimo volo

Good story line but the acting is very atrocious. It's like all the actors are simply reading their lines, going through the motions. There is actually no "acting" involved. This could have been much better than it was but they must not have had enough money to hire actual actors let alone good actors. Don't waste your time on this one. It's three hours of your life wasted that you'll never get back. Pick something else to do like watching paint dry or watching your grass grow. Now I'm simply trying to use enough characters so that I can submit this review of this absolutely terrible terrible show.

The Hindenburg disaster had interested me for years and there have been a number of good documentary features as well as a quite decent Hollywood movie. Now, RTL Germany wanted to impress its viewers with a 10 Million Euro spectacle of the tragic disaster - mixed with a lot of drama, suspense and love of course. What sounds quite intriguing at first quickly unfolds to a beginners guide on how to waste 10 Million Euros.

In the first minute of the film I was amazed, that the opening titles already contained the best images of the Zeppelin SFX Explosion - a thing which I would have saved for the very last. Then, the viewer has to endure annoying E-Guitar music for the first few scenes. This film is supposed to be set in 1937 so the musical choice is a definite let-down right from the start and continues to bother me as a viewer in repetitive manner.

The cast of the US-German production mainly consists of well-known German actors and internationally renowned names like Greta Scacchi, Stacy Keach and Lauren Lee Smith. Despite a good line-up of actors, the characters can only be described as boring and stereotypical which hints to a poor and uninspired script.

Although the plot is supposedly built around the Hindenburg disaster, the viewer is dragged for 3 long hours through an almost ridiculous storyline with a few twists and turns that eventually lead up to the films climax. The initial idea behind the script is good and would have made quite a nice 2 hour feature film - but not more.

My conclusion after having seen the entire film is simple: Too much dramatization, weak characters, a bad musical score but still nice Special and Visual effects. Nevertheless, effects don't necessarily make a good movie and giving a tragedy like the Hindenburg explosion the modern day "Disaster-Movie-Treatment" the way it was done here can only be considered as shameless and embarrassing.

Just watch the special effects....they were good! Skip the rest. Dubbing of actors voices was dreadful, plot was padded out with cheesy love story that wasn't needed, commercial jet vapour trails in the sky??....errr...wake up director!! Dreadful modern rock music totally wrecked the atmosphere of the movie.

As others have commented...why show the best special effects of the whole movie in the opening scene?? How Daft!

In my opinion this movie was dumbed down for a modern young audience to watch for entertainment, not to educate with historical information. Overall, poor!

This two part TV-movie was part of a three movie box set of not so well known war movies that we bought for my son as a Christmas present. So far we have watched two of them and they have both been worthwhile to watch.

Unfortunately we found out that this one was one of those cheap DVD's that some arrogant French publisher had dumped on a DVD dubbed to French only. No original language and not even subtitles. That's just so crappy but unfortunately this used to be quite common with DVD's in France and there was no way of seeing it without opening the box set.

Anyway, the movie itself is actually not bad. It spans three hours split into two one and a half hour episodes. The actual story is pure fiction loosely based on the bomb conspiracy theories. It is a fairly okay thriller/drama story and, despite knowing that the zeppelin is going to blow up, I took enough interest to follow the characters throughout the movie.

It was fun to see Stacy Keach again as well. I always liked watching Mike Hammer when I was younger.

The visual effects are not bad. Some people are probably going to complain about historical accuracy. The available space for the passengers, especially their sleeping compartments, seems to have been "enlarged" somewhat for the benefit of the visual impression but that doesn't really bother me that much. It's a fiction movie based on the Hindenburg disaster, not a historical documentary after all.

The one thing that bothered me, apart from the French only DVD version, was the way too modern music in the movie. It's supposed to be a 1937 setting so that modern e-guitar stuff was simply disturbing. Very poor choice indeed.

The film I saw was only about two hours including adverts so must have been cut from the three hours mentioned in the listing.

I think this movie is a good mix of mainly fictional plot, history, politics, relationships, romance, drama, some suspense and surprise, photography and special effects but one character that didn't work for me was the lead man who was too wooden and passive, yet could perform heroic feats throughout the movie including emerging unscathed and apparently totally unaffected from the most trying of situations!

Throughout the movie there are the usual unlikely circumstances, contrivances and coincidences in which our hero succeeds where common sense says he couldn't possibly do so.

I am by no means a James Bond expert but perhaps this could be seen in some ways as a poor example of a film with a lot of similarities in the format to James Bond films, as the best way to describe the genre perhaps. (A man on a mission, heroic exploits, political intrigue and a relationship with a girl!).