The premise of this movie is Polaks in Spitfires — and it is everything Christopher Nolan’s stylized, under-dramatized and, frankly, boring Dunkirk wasn’t. Riveting from the outset, the first action scene — in which a Polish fighter ace is handed the keys to a plane he has never previously flown and shoots down a Messerschmitt, only to receive a reprimand from his ungrateful RAF superiors — encapsulates the tension underpinning the narrative. Whilst this would ordinarily seem too hackneyed to be plausible, here it has a ring of truth. Certainly the film glamorizes war — but, given the under-recognized nature of the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain, this splash of glamour is well deserved. Various technical aspects of the movie are done spectacularly well, including the cinematography — which is not infrequently beautiful — the effects, which are probably CGI but look much better than that makes it sound, and the casting, which is as good as any historically based film I can think of right now, based on the matched photographs of pilots and actors shown at the film’s close, as well as a very plausible Hermann Göring (as opposed to Gary Oldman in a fat suit, which a Hollywood version would presumably entail).
FATAL VISIONS 