Michael Anderson

(On TV, November 2021) As a kid in the mid-1980s, one of the games I played a lot on my Commodore 64 was The Dam Busters, a videogame in which you fly Lancaster bombers deep over German territory to drop a bomb meant to shatter a dam. That game was definitely inspired by the film of the same name, and that familiarity was probably why I was unusually looking forward to watching the film. It generally doesn’t disappoint: As the film begins, our protagonist is a WW2 British military engineer faced with an intractable problem that doubles as an opportunity: If he can figure out how to destroy a few dams in the German industrial heartland, he can cause significant damage to the Third Reich’s war effort. But figuring out how to execute this plan consumes much of the film’s first half, as conceptual approaches are developed, tested, refined and tested again. Initially more of a very entertaining engineering fiction than a wartime thriller, The Dam Busters takes us through the details of the preparation of the raid before going through the raid itself, and abruptly becoming a wartime action movie. The Oscar-nominated special effects are still remarkably immersive, giving up an unusually credible glimpse at what it must have been to be in the cockpit of those planes as they went bombing deep over the German heartland. (The film reportedly influenced the Star Wars climax, and that’s a plausible claim.)  I wouldn’t mind a remake, though: the pacing isn’t always as snappy as it could have been, and the naming of a dog the N-word (historically accurate, and sadly not unheard of even recently) is a jarring grating element in an otherwise amiable picture. (The closed-captioning subtitles call the dog “ninja,” which is hilariously anachronic but not quite as irritating.)  There’s also some faintly disturbing dissonance, as the closing moments of the film mourn the English flyers who didn’t come back, but say very little about the 1,500-some German civilians killed by the raid — a rather common lack of empathy back in the victorious mid-1950s that would no longer be tolerated in the more distant 2010s. Still, there’s some mesmerizing material in The Dam Busters that more than lives up to my memories of playing (and repeatedly losing) the videogame — it’s quite a wartime yarn, and it’s one that can talk engineering as much as it shows fighting.