Desertman84 Memphis Belle is a fictionalization of the 1943 documentary Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress that tells the story of the 25th and last mission of an American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber called the Memphis Belle that was based in England during World War II.It featured an all-star cast with Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz, D.B.Sweeney and Harry Connick Jr. in leading roles. Having won fame with their exemplary war record and amazing lack of casualties, they expect their final assignment to be a cakewalk. Unfortunately,it was difference from what they expected as it they were assigned to bomb a heavily defended German city.It resulted loss of many lives.Memphis Belle is led by their experienced captain, Dennis Dearborn and the crew shoulders its responsibility despite mounting fears, while their commanding officer and a public relations specialist wait anxiously for their return. Things get interesting when it later found that medical officer Val Kozlowski has fake credentials.It was definitely clichéd and extremely predictable.The film was definitely made for entertainment for viewers who love films like Top Gun and Iron Eagle.Aside from that,it lacks realism as things that happen in it were definitely far from what probably happened in real life.it was obviously a fictionalization as I have stated in the first paragraph.Despite of it,the film manages to rise above it as it had great actors who delivered great performances.It definitely could provide a feeling of patriotism especially for people who did service in the military.Overall,it is still a war film worth viewing.

tenthousandtattoos I take a bit of an exception to "trapper"'s comments that people from Australia wont find much to enjoy in this film. Not to be mean, but you don't know what you're talking about mate.As an Australian (note, in case you've lived under a ROCK for the last 60 years, Australians fought in WWII as well, including my own grandfather) I feel indescribable gratitude towards those brave men and women who stood up for all of us. Without them, the nation of Australia would not exist today, because Australia would have been conquered by Japan, and would be a very different country today.It doesn't take much internet surfing or reading (yes, i still actually go to the library) to find out that the incidents portrayed in this film did actually take place, just not all on the same mission and not all happened to the Belle herself. (FYI, the Belle's real last mission was not to Bremen, it was to a target in France, and the mission went without a hitch, text-book-perfect, not really something worthy of a movie...quite boring actually despite it's significance to the crew). Yes some stuff was made up...but all in all, Catherine Wyler (William Wyler's daughter) has done a fairly exceptional job of telling all the stories she wanted to tell. She said her father (or grandfather one or the other it's been a while) told her heaps of stories about heaps of bomber crews and she wanted to tell them all, but settled on a few very dramatic ones she thought would work well for this film, and they do.Technically, give the film a break...they did a great job of making 6 real B17's look like 150. Without CGI this was a lot harder to do than it seems.I give war films the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like dialogue/realism etc simply because *drum roll* I WAS NOT THERE, therefore I don't know sh*t and so I don't try to pretend that I do. My grandfather never said much about his time in North Africa and Crete during WWII, except that I always got the impression he tried to REMEMBER his friends that were there with him, and to FORGET everything else, all the horrible things he saw and did. Things he HAD to see and HAD to do at the time. This film shows very well the camaraderie that my late grandfather held so dear.But...by all means keep bashing this film...I don't mind its low rating because I have it on DVD so what anyone else thinks of it is kinda irrelevant to me, and the naysayer comments are oh so entertaining. Like the one (Robert J Maxwell) that raves about the dog in this film...man, I had to rack my brain to even remember the dog, but this reviewer seems to feel the dog has a pivotal role in the film and ruined his enjoyment of it...whoah dude...you need to calm down man! Repeat after me...IT'S...JUST...A...MOVIE.

Travis Bickle "Memphis Belle" is an ideal movie of the World War II genre. Movie that shows cruelty and horror of the conflict but at the same time focuses on specific bonds that are to be born between the men of duty. Audience gets familiar with a crew of so-called flying fortress, the biggest bomber airplane used by Allied Forces in that period. Ten of brave, immature and so much different to each other young people on their way to final 25th combat flight over Nazi-Germany in May 1943.Viewer is introduced to the circle of individuals with their own habits for example carrying lucky items. Strong belief in symbols and luck is characteristic for the people who find themselves in extreme situations. Those unforgettable events make every crew-member a part of a brotherhood. They will tease each other and make jokes but in crucial moments they are ready for a sacrifice themselves in the name of their friendship.What makes the movie even more exciting is the scene when one of the main characters reads his poetry to the other crew-members. In fact he doesn't read his poem. It's a quotation from William Butler Yeats. An Irish writer awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. In decisive seconds he shouts writer's name to admit he didn't actually write it."Memphis Belle" is a story of the people who volunteered to fight the enemy but also must struggle against their own weaknesses. Their airplane which is supposed to be their home comes out as a metal trap held high over the clouds. Pointless fight between the men and machine is shown in a very suggestive way.

Robert J. Maxwell This film has virtually nothing to do with the original "Memphis Belle" of 1944, except I suppose that it involves the crew of a B-17 on their final mission. Maybe a few duplicate shots. That's about it. It's a kind of cinematic coelacanth, a thing we'd long thought was extinct, surfacing now in a semi-fossilized form that seems to think it's being canny in showing off clichés that were obsolete years ago. Two notably good things about it. One is that it gives us the feeling of what it's really like to be aboard a bomber in combat, or at least I think it does, never having been in that situation myself. They've convinced me though. On the ground the big airplane shivers from the vibration of the four engines like a Magic Fingers mattress. Everyone and everything jiggles at high frequency. We see bombs armed in flight. We see what the target looks like through the bombardier's sight. We feel the airplane lurch upward after the couple of tons worth of bombs are released. And we catch some of the dynamics of the crew. The bombardier has posed as a doctor. One waist gunner plays grab*** with the other's religious medallion.The other outstanding feature is the aerial photography, or the computer-generated images. Everything is so crisp, so clean, so sky blue, except for those black blotches ahead and the drab B-17s droning their way to and from hell.It's extremely exciting too, once it gets off the ground. That's part of the problem. Everything we see happening to the Memphis Belle happened to one 8th Air Force bomber or another, but never to the same airplane on the same mission. It's as if all the very real dangers facing these fliers had been put into a duck press and slapped onto the plot. If you've seen airplane-in-jeopardy movies before, you'll find little that's innovative here. A man dangling out of a hole in the fuselage (twice). The near miss after takeoff. The sight of a buddy's ship going down. Should we throw the badly wounded radio operator out with a parachute over Germany in hopes that his life will be saved? We're running out of fuel -- throw out everything we don't need. Let's sing Danny Boy for good luck. Before the mission, the pilot stands alone under the moon next to The Memphis Belle and talks to his airplane. "You're a good lady. You've gotten us home every time so far." The cornball is exquisite. Ted Lawson never talked to his airplane like that in "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" and Guy Gibson in "The Dam Busters" wouldn't dream of it.The whole film is derivative, from the beginning to the end, and everything is spelled out in big letters like a child's alphabet book. The opening lines from a PR officer tell us a lot. "Let's see now. We have a guy from Omaha, then an Irishman from Boston," or something like that. The PR officer (John Lithgow) turns out to be a knucklehead ("Baloney is my business") but that doesn't stop the writers from using him as the crudest tool of exposition.The opening scene, a drunken party, is ripped off from "Das Boot," only here, in case you didn't know why the party was taking place, it's made plain for you. "I don't want to die!" one drunk screams at the sky. In "Das Boot" Wolfgang Peterson let you figure out for yourself that despair led to drunkenness. His writers thought you had enough in the way of inferential abilities to pick it up. These writers don't.The dialog is ludicrous, right out of a 1944 funnybook.Captain to crew: "Let's make this our best bomb run ever." Crew member: "Right down the pickle barrel!" Captain: "You bet!" Captain to crew: "Boys, nobody ever said this was gonna be all fun and games. We're here to do a job so let's do it. If we don't do it somebody else will have to come back and do it." There is virtually no swearing. It's alright for us to see a man's blood and guts splattered all over the nose, but we aren't allowed to hear a terrified or a wounded man shout **** or **** or even ****.I think the most nauseating bit that's included in this movie, from the point of view of poetics, is the damned dog. See, as in all other bombing movies, the ground crew are waiting tensely for the return of "their" airplanes and crew. They play desultory softball to distract themselves but glance into the skies from time to time. They have a dog. The dog mirrors the anxiety of the men, skulking around and looking worried. At one point he flops onto his belly, his chin buried in his paws, and seems to be looking airward. I think this is known as the pathetic fallacy.At least the writers left out the conflict of crew members about some mixed up love affairs back on the ground.Well -- the film may serve its didactic purpose anyway. Kids who don't know why this war was called World War TWO may learn something from it. (A student at a well-known university once complimented Barbara Tuchman after a lecture on World War I, saying he'd always wondered why the other was called WWII.) For the rest of us, if you can stomach that dog you can get through an exciting and well-photographed war movie.