Review by Sean Marland
Stars Nikia Efremoy, Ekaterina Astahova, Nina Usatova, Vladimir Lliin | Written by Arkadiy Tigra
UK certification 12 | UK RRP £14.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 90 minutes | Directed by Vitaliy Vorobiov
Originally made as an eight-part series for Russian TV, The Bomber is a Second World War 'based-on-real-events' piece which makes an uneasy transition to the feature-length film format. The action centres on a Soviet air pilot, his radio-operator/girlfriend and the flight navigator, who find themselves in Nazi Germany after miraculously surviving a crash-landing in the opening sequences. All three soon find themselves caught up in a battle between the German soldiers (complete with a stereotypical passive-evil Nazi Commander) and a group of Russian guerrillas living in the woods.
With the unlikely love affair between the eponymous bomber and his comrade forming the drive for the narrative, director Vitaliy Vorobiov adds some interesting sub-plots which include the navigator's defection to the Nazis and the discovery of a fifth columnist in the Kremlin, but despite this, the film falls flat for a number of reasons.
At nearly three hours in length, The Bomber feels every inch a television series rather than a film and with poor subtitling (at times translations appear on screen when no-one is talking) it begins to drag in places. Keeping up with the rapid Soviet dialect is admittedly not an easy task but the editing here leaves much to be desired. Unless the Russian writers thought that lines such as: "You like food?" and "The guerrillas are shooting their guns" made for gripping dialogue, the translation occasionally lets the film down.
The action is also very 'made-for-TV' and while aerial shots, gun battles and explosions are technically excellent, they seem rather sanitised when measured against the kind of material Western audiences have become used to. Everything is very clean and some sequences seem to have been called in by extras and leads alike, giving audiences the feeling of watching from behind a glass screen or having the volume on too low. Furthermore, it's difficult to buy into the treacherous Navigator character as he switches allegiances rather too easily in a relatively gritless internment camp. Subsequently, his character fails to provide the leading couple with much-needed support and becomes a rather mundane and two-dimensional plot-device as the film proceeds to its tired climax.
EXTRAS None