The Red Baron [DVD] [2008]

Firstly, this film is well produced and well acted, but unfortunately the screenplay leaves a lot to be desired. Matthias Schweighofer plays his character with depth and feeling, but bears little resemblence to the real Richtofen. The latter was a trained Prussian officer with a high sense of duty and a ruthless attitude to both his enemies and subordinates. Schweiger's portayal shows a playful youth with an easy going nature who becomes openly critical of the German high command, which behaviour Richtofen would have regarded as undisciplined.

The air scenes are exciting and care has been taken to show aircraft of the time, although the dogfight scenes look like something from a computer game. The night fighting scene is pure make-believe but visually dramatic.

No real effort is made to follow Richtofen's life (after all, the title is The Red Baron!). A spurious relationship with his nurse is turned into a central part of the film, and she is shown wandering around the fighter airfield, which would have been off limits to civilians. Joseph Feinnes plays an enigmatic allied officer who meets up with Richtofen in no-mans-land, which just adds confusion to the story- he seems rather wasted in this role.

As a bit of light relief for the computer game generation, this film is fun but shouldn't be mistaken for history. It's full of mistakes but worth watching- at least it isn't the usual gung-ho Hollywood cobblers. Note; this is a review of the original German version, so the English release may differ.

It was a sterling effort - satisfactory acting though I thought the script started to get a little ponderous when the RB was explaining to his nurse why he wouldn't stop flying. I was fascinated by the visual interpretation of the theatres of war, both in the air and on the front, but the computer graphics - as someone else has said - did leap up and shout "Hey, look, this was done with computer graphics!" But I ignored that and hung on to the illusion as tightly as I could. That illusion was challenged again as I felt the RB's squadron tended to fly in very tight formation, too tight for my liking. It looked great, a screen packed with spinning props and overlapping profiles of Albatrosses, but I couldn't help feeling it had been overdone. There were the graphics shouting at me again. The dogfights were clearly speeded up for a modern,impatient audience, with the planes on both sides throwing themselves around the sky like jet-engined fighters. Still, I wasn't looking for a history lesson but a dash of escapism and adventure with my cocoa. So yeah, good enough.
Where the film unredeemingly let me down was the character and event development. The story, particularly in the first half of the film, seemed to be racing through a tick list, rattling off the landmark events with no passage in between. This was only emphasised by the well-intentioned but actually very necessary date strap that kept appearing in the bottom of screen. Otherwise we had the periodic deaths as pilots were knocked off their perches, with only a shallow attempt at giving them any personality, with the sad result that I felt no more sympathy for them than I would for a fallen skittle. The film took up too much time with the RB's relationship with the nurse and skimped on the RB's relationship with his men and their feelings, their fears and their morale. Though there's no way of knowing how individuals might have actually behaved, would an early twentieth century unchaperoned single woman casually let a male acquaintance into her room while she was wearing nothing but her silky pyjamas? Then, once that relationship had moved up a gear, would she stand in full view of the airfield personnel wearing his dressing gown, having emerged from his tent, to wave him off on his mission? It's all very well getting the costumes and the hardware right but social behaviour can be just as anachronistic if not researched and applied properly.
It's not until the end of the film we discover that the Jewish pilot was fictional and his presence is justified as a representation of all the Jews that fought patriotically and courageously on the German side during WW1. It's true they did, but is it really necessary to include such politically correct elements in what is after all a story based on a historical biography? The same is true for the Poles. Poland was at that time dismembered and occupied by three empires - the German, the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Inevitably, as citizens of a German empire, there would be plenty of ethnic Poles in German uniform in WW1. There is no justification for picking out one race above any other that was victimized by the Germans in WW2. However well-meaning it turns art into propaganda.
To be honest the character that engaged me most was Kaiser Bill. Only two little appearances but a screenful of presence on both occasions.
Still, just a bit of fun innit?

Shot in English with a largely German cast, Nikolai Mullerschon's 2008 German would-be epic The Red Baron is perhaps somewhat better and slightly more ambitious than the recent Flyboys, but it still pales beside earlier films about the first war in the air like Aces High and, in particular, The Blue Max, which it at times strives to emulate. But where John Guillermin's film had a genuinely ruthless anti-hero and stunning aerial sequences shot in real planes, this quickly chips away at its hero's early arrogance to find the New Man underneath and too often limits the dogfights to brief green screen and CGI sequences that are good enough but not particularly convincing (though at least are slightly better photographed than the soft and undetailed scenes on terra firma). But while it spends far too much time on the ground and never offers a single prolonged or outstanding aerial setpiece to energise the film, it's not without redeeming features, offering Von Richthofen as the first superstar air ace, star of a thousand battlefront postcards who even has French prisoners stopping him to ask for autographs he gladly signs. There is even some attempt to look at the psychology behind his tactics and the propaganda machinations behind his rise to fame, Germany's need for a hero combining with his initial arrogance, thrill of the hunt and ideal of fighting a war with grace to create the perfect media-friendly heroic image in an increasingly ugly war, while it acknowledges the incestuous nature of the war in Europe, with relatives fighting on either side in family ties that mirror the old collapsed system of European alliances. Unfortunately it raises issues but only pays them lip service and all too often dumbs down with rushed scenes and on-the-nose dialogue that spells everything out far too specifically - it even adds captions like `Berlin, capital of the German Empire' for those who flunked their basic geography.

Matthias Schweighofer is adequate in the early scenes where Von Richthofen's arrogance exceeds his actions, but develops little gravitas as the role progresses, underlining the bland predictability of the character's journey from exhilaration to disillusion as he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with his role as a propaganda tool. Til Schweiger and Lena Headey fare rather better in their clichéd roles, though Joseph Fiennes is unable to do anything with his painfully trite scenes as Roy Brown, the Canadian air ace credited with shooting down Von Richthofen (the film dodges that controversy by not showing the Baron's demise, giving him a romantic farewell before flying off into legend instead). Rather than offering any alternate perspective to the Red Baron's view of war, he's simply there to help facilitate the German ace's relationship with Headey's nurse, who opens his eyes to the true horrors of war and turns him into a politically correct jaded 21st Century figure who even answers back the Kaiser about the futility of mechanised murder in the hope of making him more acceptable to modern audiences. Unfortunately it tends to make him rather bland and anachronistic instead, something the sporadically inappropriate moments of clichéd world music in Stefan Hansen and Dirk Reichardt's score only amplifies. The end result is a watchable but unconvincingly romanticised potboiler that never does its subject or its setting justice and never offers the kind of thrilling scenes in the air that films made over half a century ago did.

Showbox's UK DVD offers the English-language version of the film in an acceptable 2.35:1 widescreen transfer considering the weaknesses of the original cinematography and a decent array of extras: making of and visual effects featurettes, 6 brief deleted scenes, outtakes, stills gallery, trailer and, er, music video of the end title song - yes, the film ends with a German pop song...