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.
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.