A WASP air crew is ferrying a bomber to Hawaii in WWII. When they arrive, they’re immediately ordered to take an officer and some secret cargo to an island in the Pacific. What could the secret cargo be? It’s near the end of WWII, it’s in a bomber, and they’re going to an island near Japan? The only reason anyone watching this didn’t guess the cargo immediately was that they gave the writers too much credit for originality. Surely it couldn’t be THAT obvious? Yes, it is. As they’re flying over the ocean, they encounter bad weather and are attacked by pterodactyls. Hmmm…WWII, bomber, giant flying creatures, where have I heard that before? Maybe in Reign of the Gargoyles, which Sci-Fi aired a few months back? Anyhow, they make an emergency landing on a small island, and battle a couple of Japanese soldiers and a hoard of pterodactyls for the remainder of the movie.
A women’s air crew that’s been working with each other for a while could have been very interesting, a lot more interesting than a male air crew – give the women some credit! But no, the things that come out of these people’s mouths are just dumb and obvious. The lead female absolutely can’t accept the fact that there are secrets during war and she’s not allowed to know them, which puts her at odds with the officer throughout the movie. So basically we get 60 minutes of arguing. The rest of the female characters are as interchangeable as their bright red lipstick and ’40s hairdos. Having characters argue throughout a movie is the cheapest of cop-outs when it comes to dialog. There’s only the thinnest veneer of character development, and it just gets darned annoying after an hour of listening to it.
The worst part is that the characters dress like it was 1945, but that’s it. What draws a person in to any drama set in the past is the difference in culture and attitudes. It’s 1945, the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor and we’re at war with them, and yet the lead woman is horrified that we might drop an A-bomb on our enemy. “Thousands could be killed!” she exclaims. Oh good grief. Three hundred thousand Germans were killed in allied bombing raids, yet this is the first time it’s occurred to her that bombs kill people? The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots only existed to free up more men to fly combat missions – to kill more of the enemy. Thousands of them. Why would she volunteer for such a thing if she’s horrified at the notion of the enemy being killed? People in 1945 were too worried about how many of their sons, husbands and boyfriends were being killed by the Japanese to engage in this politically correct nonsense anyway.
The CGI is also bad, and the direction is just sloppy. One of my favorite scenes is where they load a bunch of 55 gallon fuel drums onto a truck. Do you know how much one of those things weighs? A little under 500 pounds. Yet two people load them into the truck with just a small amount of feigned difficulty. They arrange them in such a way that as soon as the truck started moving, the drums would all roll out the back. But of course they don’t, the magic “this is just a movie” forces holding them firmly in place.
