Attempting to do a second world war aviation picture on a microbudget certainly meets the definition of underdog British pluck. But unlike the RAF in the Battle of Britain, Spitfire Over Berlin can’t surmount overwhelming odds. It’s somewhat frustrating because it’s not the visuals that let Callum Burn’s film down (though some of the CGI used for the external scenes is much too clean-looking); it’s the cliche-ballasted script, without enough fuel to fill an hour-and-a-quarter runtime, that sends the film blazing groundwards.
Spitfire pilot Edward (Kris Saddler), who enjoys buzzing English hedgerows on practice flights, seems to be the local daredevil in residence. But he draws the short straw when he is the only man available for Operation Extreme Jeopardy: to take an unarmed observation plane over Berlin to photograph defence installations in order to dissuade an American squadron that is obliviously about to undertake a suicide mission.
Burn intersperses Edward’s German mission with black-and-white flashbacks to a previous sortie gone awry, which generates a small amount of narrative heat. They can’t disguise the almost complete lack of drama in the present-day sections, with budget limitations, presumably, meaning no closeup shots of whatever it is Edward is photographing. Without that, the film languishes in a sunlit limbo, alternating flatly between CGI externals of the place and cockpit closeups. The light switching from green to red, as the onboard camera goes on the blink, does not qualify as the stuff of high-adrenaline cinema.
It is possible for a low-budget film to snare viewers with a claustrophobic premise, as Stephen Knight’s concrete-pour nail-biter Locke showed in 2013. It would have to work far more inventively than Burn’s film, though. Edward mostly just monologues away to Georgie, the pin-up girl tucked next to his flight display, presumably looking for some Matter of Life and Death lyrical uplift. But the film is over-reliant on this device; and given how inert the rest of it feels, the effect is more like an amateur flyboy having a nervous breakdown on the tarmac at a country airshow.
Spitfire Over Berlin’s ambition is laudable, and the flight sequences are precise and technically accomplished for a DIY production. But it needs to take a good hard look under the hood.
• Spitfire Over Berlin is released in cinemas on 13 May.
