Hurricane

As I have spent most of my adult life living around the Northolt area I am very aware of the debt my country owed to the brave few who protected Britain from the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940. Northolt base was the home to 303 Polish squadron this film is an almost fitting tribute to those courageous men. Unfortunately, although a well intended film, I think it could have been so much better if given a bigger budget, This really looks like a low budget made for TV movie. If the makers had given a little more care and attention to the story line which was a a bit 2 dimensional as it depicts The British pilots as arrogant toffs that hated the Pols and the Pols as melancholy aggressive drunks. This was mostly false as the fatigued British pilots and officers were aware that they needed all the help they could get. My grandfather told me that the Polish pilots were always polite and good humoured when dealing with the locals and other members of the armed forces in the area. This is represented in a small scene , but nowhere else.

Most of the performances are good and save a rather bland script that could have done with a little more spit and polish.

This could also be said for the special effects used to recreate the aerial battle sequences. The CGI went from OK to bloody awful video game graphics. But I could over look this as despite the films flaws as it is a fascinating true story and well worth a watch.

It's 1940 and France is about to fall. Polish fighter pilot Jan Zumbach (Iwan Rheon) steals a plane and escapes to England. He joins a group of international fliers eager to fight the Nazis and resists being relegated to the bombers. Witold Urbanowicz is one of the first Poles allowed to fly a fighter plane. Eventually, they are allowed to form the legendary No. 303 Squadron. Phyllis Lambert works in the RAF war room.

This starts out well. The story of the Polish fliers is compelling. Not everything is the best. The CGI aerial dogfights are not the highest quality. There are some tangential plot elements that muddle the story. It's not unexpected to have a racist British officer in this movie but it pushes every villainy onto him by making him a sexual harasser. He goes off the deep end unnecessarily. The short flashbacks are fine to lay down the groundwork for their motivations but they need to be longer to fill out their stories. As a traditional war movie, this is fine but nothing special.

Thank god the Polish fighter pilots were there to help us win the war, don't know if Britain would have survived without the 303 Squadron. They stopped the Nazis invading us!

Its amazing how a handful of pilots turned the war.

After eighty years of silence from Hollywood around the most inspiring epic story of WWII, suddenly in 2018 two movies were released about the Polish 303 Squadron based at RAF Northolt for the Battle of Britain. This little known story that surely deserves to be told, is based on the real story of the Polish Government moving itself and their military to Britain after Poland was invaded by the Germans in the west and the Russians in the east. But Does MISSION OF HONOR do this story justice? With tarty WAFs, bullying snobbish RAF pilots, and dispicable RAF officers, the inspirational core of the story seems to get lost in a series of unfortunate events, which should be that these highly skilled pilots decimated the Luftwaffe, outshone the British pilots, flew day and night in all weather daringly downing double the number of the planes that the British downed, and turned the tide of the war by preventing Hitler from invading Britain, and therefore making it possible for the Americans to have bases there. Perhaps this story has not been told in war movies because the West is ashamed of the ending. While the allies won the war, Poland became a satellite of the Soviet Union, and the Polish Military were not allowed to be a part of the Victory Parade because it would have offended Stalin. This movie is unsurprisingly anti-British in its bias, but does not allude to how the Polish pilots were appreciated by the common people of Britain as their exploits were heralded on the radio and Pathe News.

As mentioned elsewhere, the Poles deserve better than this - many of the CGI kills were highly improbable - tailplanes don't just blow up - there's no fuel down there.

That said, it is worth a watch. A better film in this genre is Dark Blue World, but it revolves around Czech pilots with real spitfires.....