The Red Baron

[Ray Rivers]

If you forget the reality (and when has this EVER got in the way of Hollywood),

This was a German production... in which I would have thought that they would have been more likely to get it right.

To bad they got it so wrong...

Though I must say, those combat scenes are super!

[Ignatieff]

This was a German production... in which I would have thought that they would have been more likely to get it right.

To bad they got it so wrong...

Though I must say, those combat scenes are super!

German yes, but trying to Hollywood.  An altogther better German production is 'The White Ribbon', up for best foreign film at the Oscars, about creepy goings on in a north German village on the eve of WWI.  But there's no gun play in that I'm afraid...

[Bugsda]

Apparently they even got Manfred and Lothar mixed up. It was Lothar that ended up in hospital with his jaw wired up, not Manfred.

I actually get all this anorak info from my brother, he's been a bit gay for the Red Baron since he was about five. He was spitting feathers when this first came out but he's calmed down now. 

[frontal assault]

I went through a WW1 craze some time ago and I think the following are worth watching:

-Red Baron
-Flyboys
-Blue Max

The Blue Max is in my opinion the best fighter pilot film ever made, and I never get tired of watching it.  Flyboys was pretty good, but then again I'll watch anything with Jean Reno in it.  As for the Red Baron, well I've just seen the trailer on play.com, and while the flying sequences look good, I find the line "We are sportsmen, not butchers" pretty hard to stomach for a guy whose favourite method of killing was to put two rounds in his opponent's chest.

[Sidney Roundwood]

I got a copy of "Red Baron" for Christmas 2009.  Despite all the historical inaccuracies (no-man's land in a pastoral field of ripe summer wheat?   The "fortress" on the Siegfried Stellung ), I have to confess I enjoyed it.  The flying sequences were great (if short), and I thought the trench scenes were quite well done.  I've watched it since with my wife and she enjoyed the love scenes with the lass from "Teminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles", so we were both sort of happy.

"Passendaele" is sort of from the same stable as "Red Baron".  There's a great scene at the end of a trench assault in the Flanders mud, and I really enjoyed the Canadian setting but that's about it.  There are a couple of laughable historical co-incidences, but on the whole there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours in my eyes.

Neither of them are anywhere near the same league as "Paths of Glory", "Blue Max", or watching the old BBC 1960s series "The Great War", however.