Improving old feature films

[YakMan]

Hello warbirders,

I am pretty ancient and Sunday afternoons were the natural habitat for War films and I have seen loads from Ice Cold in Alex to 633 Squadron and I love them all. The ground-based films did a solid job of suspending disbelief but I have to say, the special effects in many airborne films left a lot to be desired. Of course they were restricted by what aircraft were available and so we wouldn't mind a camoflaged Me108 standing in for an Me109, they were making an effort using real aeroplanes at least! Nowadays, CGI can reproduce any aeroplane you want in totally realistic detail, the trouble is, they seem unable to make them move in any believable way. A couple spring to mind, Red Tails - beautiful aerial scenes spoiled by impossibly fast spins or blood-draining turns (I won't mention the dire acting or poor casting). Another film I recently saw was Dunkirk which mixed great real aircraft scenes with some, again dire, special effects and the supenatural ability of a Spitfire to fly for much too long without a functioning engine, not to mention the obvious wooden dummy aircraft being burnt at the end; all of which which ruin the film for me. OK, so why am I writing all this twaddle? I have an idea and want to see what afficionados think of it. Instead of remaking old films, why not just use modern techniques to fix the few faults with the old (and in my view, unbeatable) films?
Lets take the National Treasure that is The Dambusters. Fantastic cast, real aircraft and a not-too-bad take on Gibson's book - its entertainment not a documentary after all. But inside the film are some things that could do with fixing. Even as a ten year old boy when I first saw it, I thought the dam explosion was awful. The model itself was really good but evidently they could not reproduce in miniature the rising water spray but what they used instead - awful!! There are many other tiny things that need tweaking, the censor blob over the bomb test film (because it was still a secret weapon even in the fifties), the dire crash scenes using Airfix models (probably). The tracer fire around the Lancasters making their runs over the water. There are loads of tiny fixes that could be made to really make a great film even greater.
Lets take another, The Battle of Britain, my favourite war film ever, I watch it over and over and know the dialogue by heart. I love it but its far from perfect. I don't mind the Buchons instead of true Me109s but . . . The horrible Lufwaffe bomber streams that are just duplicated "cut and paste" add ons. The model Stukas attacking the RADAR stations, they don't even blow up convincingly. Several in-flight blow ups that look like someone scratched the film frame by frame. With CGI you could have aircraft types that would have been there, but obviously weren't available to use like Dorniers and Junkers 88s etcetera. There are loads of really good films that use real aircraft but have really iffy model scenes that I'm sure could be fixed to make the films truly great. But what does everybody think of my idea?

 

[Barrett]

Concur, especially ref. Dam Busters which had actual 617 Sqn serial numbers on a couple of Lancs. I always cite that fact when reading the inevitable internet post, "It's a movie, not a documentary." As if the two are mutually exclusive. (And besides, we've all seen "documentaries" that are more like glitzy movies.)

 

[mikemike]

That would be a good thing to do. It's not commercially viable, however, as today's core moviegoer group - 15 year old boys in the throes of puberty - wouldn't spend money to view the results - not without making the movies more "exciting". Hmm - Susannah York shown for longer in skimpier knickers? German Me109s devastating half of London including Tower Bridge and Buck House with their mighty MGs?

It is a shame that with todays' technical capabilities, the newer productions are such lousy movies compared to, say, Tora Tora Tora or Midway, with the CGI bling-bling much more important than script or acting. Not that Tora Tora Tora couldn't be improved - the dawn takeoff scene was great using real planes taking off from a real carrier, although Akagi with a fat island on the starboard side? Japanese torpedo planes threading their way through a forest of 1970s Spruance DDs? That could be done better with CGI today (although I am sorry to say that apparently "Pearl Harbor" still sported lots of anachronistic ships). That is also a weak point of "Dunkirk" - far too few (and also unmoving) ships; the only destroyer shown is all too obviously a post-war type. The director of "Dunkirk" reportedly wanted as little CGI as possible, but the result is no improvement on, say, the French 1970's take on the matter - "Week-end á Zuydcoote" starring Jean-Paul Belmondo (have you ever seen that one?).

I think we would need someone with really deep pockets to take this on as a labour of love - just as Paul Allen did with his painstakingly authentic aircraft restorations. How about it, Mr.Bezos? I won't hold my breath, though.

Btw, scenes shot with models and water are never convincing - you can't scale viscosity or surface tension, so you get water drops the apparent size of a car.