Rating: C
Dir: Zoran Perisic
Star: Scott McGinnis, Jeff Osterhage, Miles Anderson, Nicholas Lyndhurst
a.k.a. Gunbus
The history of cinema is littered with the corpses of productions which attempted to make use of new technological processes, only to crash, burn and largely be forgotten. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, from 2004, may be the best known. Its $70 million budget was needed to make it become one of the very first films shot entirely on digital backgrounds. It flopped. But less known, is that two decades earlier, Sky Bandits went down a similar path. World War I rather than II; Zoptics (and we’ll explain that shortly) rather than CGI. It, too, was the product of a man with a vision, intent on shoehorning the film into it, and the results can only be admired as such. In some ways, Sky Bandits walked, so that Sky Captain could run.
The man in question here was Perisic, born in what is now Serbia, and who had moved to the UK as a teenager. He gained experience as a cameraman, before moving into special effects, and worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey under Kubrick. Issues with the methods used there, inspired him to create Zoptics, a front-projection system which involved putting synchronized lenses on both the projector and the film camera recording things. When they zoom in together, this creates the illusion of the object coming towards the camera. It was used to great effect on 1978’s Superman, as well as the immediate sequels, for the scenes of Superman flying. He won three special achievement and technical Oscars with it, plus a 1986 nomination for Return to Oz.
Like animation god Hayao Miyazaki, Perisic had a strong interest in flight. He held a private pilot’s license, and also wrote a children’s book, An Alien Called Freddy, about a boy who can fly. He was only intended originally to be doing the special effects work on Sky Bandits, but original director Brian G. Hutton dropped out, due to concerns about funding [Hutton had plenty of war movie experience, with the likes of Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes]. In theory, it should have been big. With a budget of $18 million and a crew of over five hundred, it was reportedly the most expensive independent production made in the UK to that point. Add another $3.5 million on advertising, plus opening on Halloween when it was the only new release, and…
It finished eighth that weekend, ending up with a gross of less than $2.3 million. Roger Ebert wrote a one-star review: “The design of the airplanes in this movie is its single, lonely, redeeming facet. Everything else is surprisingly boring.” Unsurprisingly, it quickly vanished from the cultural consciousness. Perisic went back to visual effects, including work on Radio Flyer and Cliffhanger, though did sit in the director’s chair once more for 1995’s The Phoenix and the Magic Carpet – hey, look: another flying movie – based on the book by E. Nesbit. Nobody remembers it either. For Sky Bandits, the reported running-time was 105 minutes. The versions on YouTube and Amazon Prime run 88 minutes; Tubi has one at 93, so that’s what I watched here. Whether it’s different, or just slower, I can’t say. I do note this print had the alternate title of Gunbus.
For comparison, the production cost here was about twenty percent more than 1986’s other plane spectacular – a rather better-remembered flick called Top Gun. The results are, to be honest, what you would expect when you put a special effects guy, with absolutely no cinematic experience as a director, in charge of a big-budget production. The technical elements are fine. The dramatic ones: not so much. We begin the litany of errors with the casting of charisma-free unknowns McGinnis and Osterhage, as Wild West bank-robbers with a fondness for excessive use of dynamite: Barney and Luke. [McGinnis would go on to direct Caroline at Midnight] When justice catches up with them, they are forcibly inducted into the army and shipped to France to take part in World War I. Through a series of misadventures, they end up flying a plane (quite how, when earlier they are befuddled by the sight of a Model T, is unexplained) and catch a glimpse of a massive German airship which could change the course of the war.
They end up joining a Royal Flying Corps squadron under Captain Bannock (Anderson). It’s an odd bunch. They have something approaching a collective death wise, and include a captured mechanic who still thinks he’s with the German forces. He’s played by professional Krautface Ronald Lacey (from Raiders of the Lost Ark). Also in the cast at the British airfield is Nicholas Lyndhurst. Quite what Rodney from Only Fools and Horses is doing in this, escapes me: he’d been in the show for five years by this point. Other underused elements are the two slices of Eurototty with whom the heroes hook up, and the weird flying craft which Fritz invents, such as one built from the front of a car. I’d have liked to have seen more of these. Both the craft and the Eurototty.
There is simply too much uninteresting stuff here. The scenes in the Wild West (actually Andalucia in Spain) are excessive. The faffing around before they join up with Bannock is boring. Pretty much any time anyone is talking, my attention would waver. But the aerial footage? Largely executed using the Zoptics system, that is very much on point. There a fine sequence where Barney and Luke are flying through the airship’s monstrous hangar. But the best is saved for last, when our heroes return, with the aim of forcing the enemy craft to the ground. Watching this, you get a sense of what this could have achieved. Then, all too soon, it’s over and we’re abruptly flung back to the West, for an ending as unsatisfying as the opening.
The film has almost been forgotten. Right now, there are less than 400 ratings and just eleven critics’ reviews on the IMDb. Most of the latter are from its original release, forty years ago. One is actually for a completely different movie from the same year: Sky Pirates. This obscurity is not undeserved. Make no mistake, this is not a good film, with flaws which are both obvious and numerous. But it is an interesting one, and almost unique in its merging of Western, Great War and neo-steampunk genres.