Biggles

While browsing through a second-hand shop, I came across a video I had not seen since my primary school days. Biggles: The Movie.

I had won the book of the film at school and had rented the vid from the local shop after becoming obsessed with the book. It all came flooding back to me, what a piece of film history I had rediscovered! Wow, at just £3 (UKP), I had found the bargain of a lifetime!! Possibly the best film ever about a time-travelling, fictional WWI airman I have ever seen! What, it's the only one? Oh never mind, it's still part of my childhood

I like this movie, having just seen it for the first time, and I have never read the original Biggles books. But, it's clear even to me that the film hasn't attempted to stay true to the original stories.

Nethertheless I found great entertainment value in this movie, which is simply to be enjoyed in a rather light hearted way it seems.

No doubt this time-travel based production was slip-streaming behind the great success of Back to the Future, and it's a real roller-coaster ride and a fantastic culture clash between the 1980's and WWI eras. Any such movie released back in the mid-eighties should have done well at the box office, at least on paper.

This film really is so eighties though, from the synthesiser-heavy intro music, down to the "punk scene", and the strikingly bleak grayish hotel lobby and eighties typefaces, that even people like myself who grew up in the eighties will probably feel more at home in what seems like the more "normal" WWI scenes.

Was the eighties really that potently eighties? Obviously, it was, but it didn't seem like that at the time of course.

So for me, this film has been a trip back in time to the eighties, and it fits in so well with a great sequence of other really enjoyable films I watched back then in my teenage years. I can't believe I somehow didn't see it at the time, but I'm really glad to have seen it at last in 2007.

The aircraft scenes were highly enjoyable, and it's always good to see Peter Cushing too.

7/10 from me.

I hate to quibble with a comment but I had to offer some follow up to the comment regarding the disbelief of a German secret weapon during World War I. The concept for a wave type weapon has its origins before World War I with Nicola Tesla, who first postulated the notion of what has become known as scalar waves. Modern physics denies that such waves can exist but Tesla was convinced that they did and according to some he provided it (Tesla Horwitzer). The British actually developed the first theoretic underpinnings for a sound weapon of the type depicted in Biggles and frankly I thought that is where the idea came from. We "moderns" think far to much of our capabilities. What is happening today is that some open minded scientists are revisiting discarded Victorian science. How many people know that the modern principles of William Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic principles are taught today in a truncated form and that the missing parts may in fact provide the theory for effective wave weapons (ever wonder why the US government spends so much time on Star Wars technology?). By the 1930s, the Germans were developing a number of secret weapons including the so called death rays. I think it prudent to give early modern humans credit for being just as creative as our generation and a lot more open minded.

I always believed I'd grow out of this film, but that hasn't happened yet. True, the plot's impossibly silly, but when I first watched the film, that didn't matter to me. Frankly, it still doesn't. Don't watch this film if you're looking for some serious intellectual stimulation. However, if it's great fun, great music and a major dose of eighties nostalgia you're after, this could be the one for you. One last thing - the main theme "Do you wanna be a hero" still sends shivers down my spine every time I see the opening credits.

...what a pity the original movie wasn't worked on with the same skill and dedication.

I am a very big fan of the books. I read 'Biggles of 266' when I was aged 10 and 29 years later I'm still reading the adventures.

What a waste of the Biggles movie license.

The film wasn't all bad, though. Neil Dickson's portrayal of Biggles was spot on. The supporting actors did a pretty good job as well. The production design was excellent (well, the 1917 bits, anyway). That takes care of the good points.

Where the hell did they drag that soundtrack up from? Nasty is what I call it. I actually cringed during the film, due to inapropriate music.

The stunts were mostly unnecessary ego-boosting cliches.

The script was a total nightmare. Either copy Indiana Jones OR Back to the Future, not BOTH! If they'd cut the 80s bit out, cast Hyde-White as an american reporter and kept the secret weapon bits in, I would have no quibble with this film.

I would recommend buying the DVD if only for the unintentionally hilarious documentary. "..we thought a big star would've 'unbalanced' the film..." you don't say!!!

£3.99 at WH Smiths - buy it now! The spirit of Edward D Wood Jr. lives on!