Red Baron (2008)

I saw this movie yesterday and wasn't really impressed with it. It is a German movie (about the famous World War 1 flying ace, Manfred von Richthofen known as the Red Baron) and yet the whole thing was in English. There is just something off-putting when you hear a group of real German actors talking to each other in what is supposed to be German and yet they all have British accents and say things like "Bloody good." I know that not the whole cast was German, but still it didn't have a good flow to it.

I don't know much about the Red Baron so can't really compare the actor who played him here to the real life one, but in the movie he seems very arrogant.

One aspect of the movie that I found was thrown in the viewer's face several times was the fact that there was a Jewish pilot. His plane had the Star of David on it and at the end the director said that there were many Jewish pilots in the German Air Force in World War 1.

During World War 1 there was no open, official discrimination of Jews in Germany so the fact that the pilot was Jewish would not have mattered. It only came up once the Nazis took control in 1933 and officially discriminated against the Jews (although those Jewish veterans of World War 1 who fought for Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire were given special exemptions at the beginning.) It seems the German director was trying too hard to show that the Germans did not always hate the Jews and his attempt was just too much.

I think that had the film been either completely in German or as in the case of several of more current movies (like "Dresden") where those portraying Germans speak German and those portraying the British speak English, etc it would have been more realistic and much, much better.