Battle Over Britain review – Spitfires duke it out in derring-do war drama

A squadron of fighter pilots is depicted over 24 hours in 1940 in Callum Burn’s stripped-down-to-the-rivets tale

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.