It is not that 'The Dam Busters' is about a war crime committed on the watch of the notorious butcher who inspired fantastic novels such as Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five'. Normally a film glorifying a war crime would leave you outraged or upset; at any rate, you would expect it to trigger some kind of emotion. Here that's not the case. In 'The Dam Busters' the most emotionally gripping moment is when a dog gets run over. The rest is boredom. Michael Redgrave plays a kind of engineer-inventor who keeps breezily talking about technical stuff, Richard Todd is the intrepid young wing commander who talks in more or less the same tone about flying-related stuff. The rest of the cast is too bland to leave any impression at all. There is no plot to speak of, that is, no conflict that causes consequences that are in some way resolved by the end of the film. The inventor experiments with bombs, the airplane crews practice dropping bombs, and eventually the dams are busted. That's it. The score is alright; that is why I am rating this film 3 stars rather than 2. One wants to be fair, isn't it?
Review of The Dam Busters
