Biggles (1988)

The greatest movie ever made..!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Jim (Alex Hyde-White) is a catering manager with a busy schedule. Yet, one day, a strange man comes calling at his house, in a thunderstorm. He's secretly an officer, Colonel Raymond (Peter Cushing) from World War I! Whoa! He tries to warn Jim about future strange happenings but the catering man doesn't listen. All too soon, Jim is back in time, flying an aircraft in WW I and hanging out with Bigglesworth, Biggles for short (Neil Dickson). That's because, as the colonel tried to explain, he is Biggles "time twin". Thus, never knowing when, Jim is transported between two time periods. Naturally, this upsets his food business while he gets into many a hair-raising situation as a pilot. Sometimes he's captured and interrogated, while he and Biggles face even firing squads. Is this supposed to be fun? This movie is not really as large as its title indicates but its a pleasant enough experience. Based on a long ago set of popular British novels, its escapades probably worked better in print form. Hyde White is cute as the poor soul with the time travel problem while Dickson is quite dashing. Costumes are fine while special effects are adequate. All in all, there are worse ways to spend an evening but don't harbor high expectations before a showing.

I like this movie, having just seen it for the first time, and I have never read the original Biggles books. But, it's clear even to me that the film hasn't attempted to stay true to the original stories.Nethertheless I found great entertainment value in this movie, which is simply to be enjoyed in a rather light hearted way it seems.No doubt this time-travel based production was slip-streaming behind the great success of Back to the Future, and it's a real roller-coaster ride and a fantastic culture clash between the 1980's and WWI eras. Any such movie released back in the mid-eighties should have done well at the box office, at least on paper.This film really is so eighties though, from the synthesiser-heavy intro music, down to the "punk scene", and the strikingly bleak grayish hotel lobby and eighties typefaces, that even people like myself who grew up in the eighties will probably feel more at home in what seems like the more "normal" WWI scenes.Was the eighties really that potently eighties? Obviously, it was, but it didn't seem like that at the time of course.So for me, this film has been a trip back in time to the eighties, and it fits in so well with a great sequence of other really enjoyable films I watched back then in my teenage years. I can't believe I somehow didn't see it at the time, but I'm really glad to have seen it at last in 2007.The aircraft scenes were highly enjoyable, and it's always good to see Peter Cushing too.7/10 from me.

No-one could have put money on this working. And, of course, in many ways, it doesn't. If I saw it for the first time now, I might hate it. However, I watched it endlessly as a child. An American in the 1980s finds himself shunted back in time to World War II and meets the famous Biggles. The time zones are linked by Biggles' commanding officer, now an old man, and the very 80s Jim finds himself part of a plan to prevent the Germans developing a new weapon. It's cheesy trash. I absolutely love it.

Biggles was originally a WW1 pilot created by Captain W.E Johns in a series of dashing adventure novels. I'm not a purist and I don't mind new twists on old material, but this sci-fi/time-travel slant on the old stories strains the patience beyond belief. It's such a contrived, feeble concept - badly scripted, badly directed and badly acted - that only the most easily satisfied of viewers will enjoy it. You know you're in trouble from the moment the film's cheesy disco-style theme tune, "Do You Want To Be A Hero", kicks in during the opening credits. Young New Yorker James Ferguson (Alex Hyde-White) arrives home at his apartment only to be confronted by a mysterious old Englishman named Colonel Raymond (Peter Cushing). Moments later, there's a mysterious flash of lightning and Ferguson finds himself whisked back in time to a WW1 battlefield, just in time to save the life of ace pilot Biggles (Neil Dickson). It turns out that Ferguson and Biggles are "time twins" and that whenever one is in grave danger, the other will come zapping through time to the rescue. The wittiest moment in the film comes during the final credits, when a monicker comes up on screen reading: "Filmed on location in New York - London - and the Western Front 1917". Other than that, this is a witless affair indeed. It's quite sad to see the legendary Cushing slumming in such a weakly written cameo role. Some of the action sequences set during WW1 rise to the giddy heights of "mediocre", but the 1980s sequences are hopelessly tacky, and the twist ending in which our irritating hero is zapped back to a cave full of cannibal tribesmen is just plain awful. On the whole, Biggles is a monumental example of how low a point entertainment sank to during the era of cinematic junk that was the '80s.