After Action Report: Dam Busters Wrap Up

Greetings WingNuts,

In honor of last week's premiere meeting of the Wing Commander Movie Club (name pending) we've decided to start posting after action reports talking through what the group thought about and discussed with each movie. If all goes according to plan we'll run them in the news on Fridays alongside the reminder posts! Now what did we think about The Dam Busters…

In general, we found the movie to be extremely dry… especially the first half, which focuses on the development of the bouncing bomb and the training for the attack. Audience sensibilities have changed a lot in sixty-nine years: the thought of starting a war movie with old men talking about math and then not getting to an actual air battle until the very end would be unthinkable now. That's not to criticize the movie itself, it's just very difficult for a younger viewer to connect with today. Along the same lines, it's fascinating to see how a prestigious movie made with the war in sharp living memory is structured... and particularly how much more strongly they felt the need to stick to the real story as it was understood rather than updating it for a more satisfying narrative structure. Seeing how it assumes we are going into the story already familiar with extreme details of the war and how it expects we will view the morality of things like exploding dams is pretty fascinating. And then there's the third act, which is still fairly spectacular today. The extended raid sequence, which as noted in the introduction post was a major inspiration for Star Wars' Death Star battle, holds up very well. A fleet of actual war-era Lancaster bombers allowed for the kind of realism that modern CG is only just catching up to… seeing actual RAF bombers still puts the most expensive Masters of the Air sequences to shame.

But what about the connection to Wing Commander? We had gone into the movie asked to pay special attention to the score, which Chris Roberts had asked David Arnold and Kevin Kiner to study for the 1999 film. What we found was… very little music! It became a bit of a running joke how little music was actually in the film until the famous Dam Busters March during the climax.

It's hard to say the march sounds particularly like Wing Commander's overture but its role in the film and the way it stands out does come across. ace, who is more of an expert on such things than I could even imagine, reviewed it thusly: "Wikipedia mentions how the composer's son claims that he was trying to write something that sounds like one of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, and it really, really does. You could listen to all of them together and not pick them apart. It's the kind of thing you'd go to the concert hall to listen to and smile very loudly at. And a mostly ceremonial, self-congratulatory, militaristic sound that calls back to the glory days of pre-Great War England seems to be the perfect choice for The Dam Busters."

It seems telling that The Dam Busters March has been played by British military bands for generations… and that those same groups now sometimes include Wing Commander's overture in their performances! Even if the two don't sound the same, they captured a very similar imagination.

The bigger connection to Wing Commander that we picked up was that the very structure of the air raid is extremely similar to a Wing Commander mission… down to the specific camera angles used in the pilot's briefing! From the similar uniforms to the same shot of everyone standing up, the Dam Busters' briefing could've easily stood in for one of Colonel Halcyon's on the Tiger's Claw.

And then the mission itself is literally a Wing Commander mission complete with an orchestrated takeoff sequence, a flight to the nav point, an air battle and then a return to base with a shot of how much damage the hero bomber has suffered! If the Wing Commander I team weren't consciously thinking of this movie they were thinking of something that was visually and narratively influenced by it at some point.

We also see a very early example of the 'leaders nervously waiting for word at headquarters' trope that air combat stories introduced. As Harris and company wait around the radio for word of the squadron's fate you can't help but think of something like Wing Commander Academy's "Red and Blue" with Tolwyn and company waiting to hear from the cadets in the nebula as its great, great, great grandson.

And then there's the elephant in the room… which in this case is a black dog with an unfortunate name. Volumes have been written on the subject and they aren't particularly interesting but if you aren't familiar, the historical squadron leader's dog was named an egregious racial slur which was then used as the code word to announce over the radio that the attack had been successful. The end result in the film, which kept with its theme and stuck as close to reality as possible, isn't so much something offensive that no one should watch as it is an endless series of cringes as British soldiers happily shout something awful to greet the dog. It is the rare situation where you breathe a sigh of relief when a dog is finally hit by a car. That said, Wing Commander DOES also have a story in which a heroic wing commander happens to have a (contemporarily) offensively-named cat… False Colors, where we meet Kevin Tolwyn's black cat Thrakhath!

He tossed his bag on the bunk and did a double-take as something moved against the space-black blanket. "Well, hello, who's this?"
Tolwyn reached down and picked up a bundle of black fur. "The official Independence reception committee. Jason, meet Thrakhath. He's one of our ship's cats."
The black cat opened a pair of startling green eyes and studied Bondarevsky suspiciously. After a moment the cat started to purr loudly, obviously glad of the attention Tolwyn was giving his neck and ears.
Bondarevsky chuckled. "Thrakhath, huh? Does he know he's royalty?"
"Absolutely," Tolwyn replied, returning the cat to the bed. "He finds his way into just about every corner of the ship, usually through the ventilation system . . . though some of us think he can walk through walls when he wants to. But he's staked out this deck as his personal territory. If you don't want him slipping in here and bothering you, we'll install a screen he can't get through."
"Nonsense," Bondarevsky replied. "I can use the company."

Aside: the accuracy of the description of Thrakhath disappearing into a black blanket tells me that Andrew Keith absolutely had a black cat. Thank you to our Thrakhath model: Sullivan T. Cat.

Want to join the club but can't be around for the group watch? Just watch the movie and share your thoughts on Discord or the forums to earn your wings!