Spitfire Over Berlin

I am the co writer and co producer of this work and I am proud of it, despite its flaws.

My son, Callum, and I have worked very hard to build a business that produces low budget entertainment. We work from our family home in a spare room and don't earn a great deal from it, but we love film and we love working together and that's enough for us.

Reading some of the reviews on here is hard to say the least. However, we're strong enough to take it.

We didn't set out to make a flawed film. We set out to make the best film we could. The tiny budget, our lack of experience (we continue to learn and try to improve) and time restrictions did the rest.

My first reaction to reading some of the reviews on here was to get angry and hit back with a ten out of ten review of my own. Upon reflection, I don't need to do that. I know how hard the tiny cast and crew worked on Spitfire Over Berlin. Many of them are my family and close friends and I love them.

That's all that matters at the end of the day.

The acting is not bad, and the story is so-so (predictable and not very deep, but that's okay for war movies), but the actual spitfire is embarrassing and almost made the movie unwatchable.

The opening sequence is the Spirtfire flying while avoiding flak, and the 100% CGI plane is horrendous, even worse than MS Flight Simulator. Same thing with the single flack burst that was copied and pasted numerous times.

I almost shut the movie off then, but decided to tough it out for a while, but every time you almost start to look past the terrible CGI, they through some other ridiculousness in your face. The actual plane used in land scenes is obviously a mock-up built with Phillips screws that weren't used on Spitfires, some even aren't painted, and every surface is brand new - showing zero use. Kind of like watching a jungle warfare movie where they've been trekking through a tropical jungle for weeks, but their faces are still clean, their T-Shirts still white, no one is sweating, and their uniforms are still clean with creases intact.

It's really hard to look past the poor attention to detail and get immersed into this movie, no matter how hard you try.

Being a indie film producer myself, I admire that this team at least got distribution on this. In today's very critical audience (you can see by the rude comments here) either you have at the very least, a 2 million dollar budget, or don't film. This film might have fared better just doing film festivals and maybe getting a streaming service to pickup. The storyline is good, but yes, today's sophisicated audience is brutal if you are not using Hollywood "Industrial Light & Magic" level CGI as they can tell. It is sad and if this was released back in the 60's or early 70's, it might have gotten a pass. I admire the filmmaker for working with what budget he had, and who knows, he might make his investment back and thats all that is important. Critics may gripe, but at least they paid to watch it somehow and that is all the investors care about.

It's more like a high school project than a movie. No reason to go on but I need 150 words. The audio isn't mixed right so it doesn't match. Special effects would have been better off using a model airplane on a string. Music rarely matches what's going on. Plot has many problems "you're the only pilot left for this mission!" My first ever review and I'm just trying to save another innocent person from this fake rating.

This is a competent but boring movie, largely because it has nothing original going for it, nothing exciting or interesting. The effects are way below standard, acting passable but not great. Story itself is bare bones and without imagination.

I'd probably give this 3 or 4 stars, but minus points for the annoying (and very obviously fake) reviews... a terrible idea, since it will ultimately make your score lower.