Warbirds

I admit this movie isn't very good. The visual effects and the acting are poor. The only thing I really liked about this movie were the female pilots. I like the idea of a group of beautiful female pilots during the second world war. I liked the heroine of the film Maxine West, she is as pretty as she is tough and resourceful.

I also liked the fact that Brian Krause plays an Air Force Colonel. Because the role Brian is most famous for playing Leo in the Charmed TV series. For those of you who haven't watched Charmed, Leo is a whitelighter for the Haliwell sisters in Charmed. Whitelighters are guardian angels for good witches. And Leo was originally a medic for the U.S. army during the Second World War, he was suddenly killed in a battle and in heaven became a whitelighter. So in Warbirds Brian plays another WWII character but this time he plays a soldier.

The flying dinosaurs are scary but aren't very realistic.

While the female pilots do have some action in fighter aircraft. It wasn't as intense as I hoped. So I only recommend Warbirds if you like the idea of seeing tough and pretty women in action. But don't have any good expectations about this movie.

Like many of the other commentators, I love made-for Scifi-movies and how could I resist "Dinosaurs Vs. WWII" as a plot summary? I should have. It was crap. Bad acting, bad effects, bad script, and bad directing. Even the costumes were garbage. The whole thing might have been salvaged if the actors/directors hadn't taken themselves so seriously. The movie would have actually been fun as a tongue-in-cheek thriller, but they insisted upon acting as if dinosaurs fighting lady-aviators in a Pacific atoll was high art. If there is a merciful God, Scifi will put this turd back in the vault and never speak of it again.

i can hear the production meeting now: "we've had too many 'people stuck on an island with a monster' movies. how can we freshen it up"? from what must have been the lengthy brainstorming session that followed, here comes the result. i know, let's show women wearing bright red lipstick and put some pomade in their hair. that way, we know we're in the 40's during WW2! here comes sci-fi channel's magnum opus "warbirds". an all-girl flight crew (with a few men along for the ride) are piloting a super secret something-or-other across the pacific when they are attacked by a big bird and forced down on a mysterious island. they meet up with some Japanese soldiers, who are also stranded and attempt to figure out what's hunting them at night and how to escape the island.

The Good: dinosaurs and Japanese Zeros in air-to-air combat! The Bad: SyFy Channel 'zero budget movie-of-the-week'. The Ugly: Bad writing even for SyFy Channel, supporting cast.

The concept is great for an afternoon popcorn flick, and the storyline *in general* didn't require too much suspension of disbelief (no impossible physics, or blatant violations of common-sense science that seem all-too-common in recent movies). However, steps taken to get from plot-point A to plot-point B often made no sense at all. It's as if the script were outlined by a decent writer, then fleshed-out by a 12 year-old.

It's no mega-budget blockbuster, but the effects were actually very good for the budget level. *Everything* was done using cgi and green screens though, including anything with a plane in the shot. The picture is good enough, but the not-quite-right flight physics make the effects rather noticeable (look away from any landings, trust me). It works well for the creatures, not so much for airplanes. 10 minutes of stock footage of WWII planes in flight would have made this film much more enjoyable to watch.

The male and female leads do a good job with what they were given, which wasn't much (some of the dialog was just painful to sit through). Some of the supporting cast, however, made me cringe whenever they had speaking parts. In their defense, they were trying to overcome a script that was even worse than the usual SyFy weekly offering.

Overall, the effects were good for the budget, but not enough to make up for the poor writing or mediocre acting. A tolerable 'fix' for those who crave sci-fi, but a disappointing take on an interesting premise.

Another in the seemingly endless series of Sci Fi Channel CGI monster movies. If you watch the channel at all, you know the type. A bunch of clichéd characters are stranded in a remote location and menaced by computer generated creatures.

I'll probably hate myself in the morning for saying this, but the effects here were above typical Sci Fi Channel fodder. Which isn't to say that they were convincing. They just didn't look like rejects from a Nintendo game system.

The plot tries to have some social relevance, masquerading as a tale of militarism vs. humanitarianism. That said, the mechanics were often forced. And some of the acting was painful to watch. In all honesty, I may be giving this film a higher score than it deserves, as I didn't see the first half (which means the entire setup and reasoning behind the monster infestation).

But even if I am right, and this wasn't as bad as a many of the channel's previous crimes against humanity, I'm still forced to ask who it is that greenlights such films? What happened to the notion that great Sci Fi meant great ideas instead of ineffective monsters?