As Good As It Gets

A Masterpiece!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

the homosexual undercurrent coming from Sinclair towards Croft in the lakeside scene?,Love this film OK so there were a few inaccuracies it's called artistic licence but i don't think to many liberties were taken, For instance Parachutes were not available to pilots of the RFC nor were they used by the RAF during the First World War – although the Calthrop Guardian Angel parachute (1916 model) was officially adopted just as the war ended. By this time parachutes had been used by balloonists for three years, Overall i thought it portrayed pretty well the RFC at that time still very much in it's infancy and the mood of the time and place Only one niggle Leeds i live in Leeds and its a lovely place We must never forget the sacrifice these young pilots made Lest we forgetMy God, It's full of stars

I think this is a very believable film. All the actors perform well and it all adds up to an excellent anti war film. Malcolm McDowell is brilliant as Gresham. At the start of the film he goes back to his old school and tells tales about caning the enemy. In reality he is close to cracking up due to the stress of constant fighting and having to send ever younger boys to their deaths. Peter Firth plays the naive young pilot who believes Gresham is a perfect hero and that the war will be fun. He slowly begins to see things differently when he sees the death and suffering at the front when Gresham goes to pick up a German pilot he has shot down. Then there is Simon Ward who cannot face flying anymore and uses supposed illness to avoid going up. There is also a very realistic scene where one of the pilots is seen falling to his death in flames when his plane catches fire. Gresham has tried in vain to get parachutes issued but the commanders have decided that parachutes could mean that a man is more likely to jump than carry on fighting. This gives the message that they don't care about the men as there will always be others to replace them. In some versions of the film I have seen the ending is immediately after Peter Firth's character (Croft) is killed in the collision with an enemy plane. To me this is wrong because the last part after this is one of the strongest in the film. Gresham is back in his office as the sole survivor of the last mission and he is struggling to write letters to the families of the dead. He makes several attempts. Then 3 new young kids are introduced and Gresham is once again faced with knowing that they too will most likely soon be killed. He goes to the window and in his imagination sees Croft coming towards him. This shows a man pushed to the limit who cares deeply about the killing but realises he cannot do anything about it. I rate this as a great anti war film. The characters are believable and the action scenes are realistic. Although some scenes were borrowed from the Blue Max most of them are new and even though most of the planes are not original they still look excellent. Overall strong performances, excellent action scenes and a believable story make this a film well worth seeing.

Its an anti war film. That's it. No great epic, no great direction, no good production values and certainly not even original. I mean how many war films over the past 30/40 years do you know that are set in WWI that are not weighed down with a none too subtle anti war message? This is nothing different and nothing that hasn't been seen before, even in the mid 70s. Positive side. Both Christopher Plummer as the "best of a bad job" and Malcolm McDowell "I can not handle this, pass the whisky" are excellent and the planes do look the part. Class system shown (as it was/is in the British forces) but not stuffed in your face so it dominates the film.The aerial battles are good but not exactly "Battle of Britain" standard and the whole film seems to have been shot in a filed round the back of the studios and the ending is hardly a shock. Still all in all it an alright if not good film to watch on a Sunday afternoon.

I have seen this film when I was young, and was very impressed. Probably it turns on my interest in aerial warfare in World War I. Despite technically awful from the airplanes types view, the film shows exactly, with no glamour, how was the life of fighter pilots in WWI.Life expectancy for a new pilot was just two weeks. There was no real training for the pilots, and few of the old pilots care about teaching anything to the new ones. If you look at the dangerous machines they should fly, antiaircraft fire and the enemy machines, it's a miracle that someone has survived to told us the history.