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Joseph Fiennes as captured Canadian airman Captain Brown |
Baron’s tale shows war is plane wrong
THE RED BARON
Directed by Nikolai Mullerschon
Certificate 12
THERE is a lovely story waiting to leap out of this film.
All the ingredients for a moving war story are here: you have a dashing young fighter pilot (The Red Baron, played by angelic German leading man Matthias Schweighofer) and his chums pushing the aviation envelope, a gorgeous love interest provided by a tear-stained nurse fed up with the senselessness of war, a drip-drip realisation by aforementioned war hero that fighting for one’s country is not all it’s cracked up to be...
Yet this polished biopic of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the air ace so beloved by the boys’ comics of the 1920s, singularly fails to hit the target.
It is too quaint, too neat and tidy, and while its heart is undoubtedly in the right place in terms of what its plot is trying to say, it does so without the dash such a character deserves.
Still, for all its straight-to-telly feel it offers up enough dog fights, and romance to tickle the dreamers in the audience.
We meet the young von Richthofen as he gallivants through forests near his ancestral home, a deadshot hunter at an early age, a skilled horseman who if he had been born 50 years previously would have been a dashing cavalry officer. Instead, we’re shown that this is a new dawn – the dawn of the aeroplane, and like so many young men of his generation, the idea of flight is glorious to von Richthofen.
Fast forward to the Great War, and we learn von Richthofen is an Ace in the Luftwaffe, famed for his unerring ability in shooting down enemy aircraft, and his chivalrous approach to the matter of airborne death.
Our tale goes like this. We learn of von Richthofen’s camaraderie with the Royal Flying Corps – the precursor to the RAF – when we watch him drop a wreath into the grave of a British pilot he has downed from on high during a dogfight.
Then we see him rescuing another pilot he has shot down, thus saving his life.
He happens to be a Canadian, Captain Brown, played with chiselled authority by Joseph Fiennes.
In the handover of the injured airman to a nurse, the beautiful Kate, we meet the love interest who will change the way von Richthofen considers war and offer an illustration of how the upper-class pilots fought as if they were playing a game of cricket.
As his stock grows, the German High Command increasingly decorate the Red Baron, and then use him as a symbol to gee up others involved in the war.
He becomes a propaganda tool for the High Command and as we leadenly discover, von Richthofen gradually realises he is an important cog in the war machine, a driving force in the senseless slaughter taking place in the trenches below.
He then has to struggle with his conscience – balancing his loyalty to his country and fellow officers with his innate understanding that war is simply wrong.
While the Red Baron paints an eloquent case for the unpleasantness of war, and the seedy use of our young men to fight politicians battles, its far too simple to work as a proper anti-war statement. |
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