This unabashedly retro war story, set over 24 hours in August 1940, strips the action down to the rivets with a small cast and a handful of locations, including the cockpits of several Spitfire planes (or perhaps one plane used to stand in for several). You’d think it might have cost no more than a tin of biscuits and few packets of tea to make – except that the aerial photography, never a cheap component, looks authentic and presumably special effects were required to create the dogfights in which our heroic fly-boys duke it out in the skies against the Luftwaffe.
Directed by Callum Burn and co-written by him and his father Andrew, it’s of a piece with the previous features from their Lincolnshire production company Tin Hat, specialists in second world war tales of heroism and aerial derring-do. Given the numbers of actual veterans and survivors of the conflict are swiftly dwindling now, you have to wonder how much interest is out there to make this tiny niche in film production profitable. Presumably, there are enough people who yearn for a simpler time when men were men, women wore boilersuits and everyone was pretty much united in one virtuous common cause.
The slightly dodgy figure here is Nathan Walker (Vin Hawke, good even if the haircut is more 2020s footballer than 1940s pilot), who is obsessed with winning the betting pool on who can shoot down the most Jerries. His cynicism puts him at odds with his fellow pilots, especially Cochrane (Tom Gordon) and wistful Cooper (Micky David) who wants to survive long enough to marry his sweetheart Nancy (Hannah Harris, rocking the aforementioned boilersuit). In between missions up in the air fighting the enemy, the men relax at the dispatch hut near the runway and banter. The ringing of the telephone becomes a frequent augur of death: after each sortie someone won’t come back, or might land just in time to die accompanied by some sentimental music.
One’s lip would have to be stiff as postwar Festival of Britain-era concrete not to find such sacrifices at least a tiny bit moving – at least the first few times, but it does get a bit monotonous. Still, plaudits to the Tin Hat team for keeping the home fires burning for those who served.
• Battle Over Britain is released on 1 December in UK cinemas.
