James Cameron is to blame. In his 1997 hit "Titanic" he used, in a rather tasteless way, a real-life tragedy as backdrop for a larger-than-life love story. Now some stupid German TV producers wanted to do just the same and came up with something even more tasteless.
The first thing I noticed while watching this much anticipated "TV event" was, that all the British spoke German. I wondered why that British pilot in Dresden tried to avoid talking to Germans, because when he spoke, it was always in perfect German without any accent (I might add, that in the "Making-of" features which promoted the film beforehand, it was pointed out that only British actors were cast for the British parts, for greater authenticity). Have you people never heard of the concept of "subtitling"?
The story of this film comes straight out of our favorite handbook "How to write a screenplay for beginners", so everything is trite, obvious and corny, from the way our heroine meets her hero just as she is about to get engaged, to the point where she is miraculously re-united with her dying father so he can whisper "I'm sorry" before drawing his last breath... And as you might expect, the directing is as trite and unimaginative as is the story.
When it comes to the bombing, there is a lot of explosions and fire, which is not the least impressive, as we have seen better explosions and bigger fires in hundreds of Hollywood films. Of course they throw in some gore (but not too much, as this is supposed to be prime time material), so no one can blame them of not having shown the "real" horror of war.
Some thing I liked was the cast and the acting, especially that of some of the supporting actors, for example Wolfgang Stumph as a priest and Katharina Meinecke as Annas mother. I really liked Susanne Bormann as the heroine's sister. I'd rather have followed her through the film instead of Felicitas Woll's Anna, that annoying prig who never hesitates to dump her fiancé (without telling him, of course) in favour of a handsome Englishman she barely knows. Oh, how I hate this kind of women.
