Hindenburg: le géant des airs

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!

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.

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!).

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 story: an abstruse, hair dragged conspiracy theory with more holes in it than Swiss cheese. The acting: poor and wooden as matchsticks. The directing: boring, awfully bad and totally uninspired (in every dialog scene throughout the film the director uses the same over shoulder shots). But the most annoying part of the film: the male protagonist's haircut! I could go on with that list, but it would be endless, because this film has nothing good to offer. NOTHING!

So why does RTL always manage to come up with nothing than total rubbish when they spent a fortune making a TV movie? The answer: They don't know what GOOD really is!