Day 2 - Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986)

This is the thing about small children: they're gullible. We encourage them to trust the correct sort of adult authority figure - parents, teachers, policemen. Oh, and Blue Peter presenters. If the likes of Janet Ellis or Peter Duncan were to tell you, say, that a mediocre action flick based partly on a series of First World War adventure stories and partly on the previous year's box-office smash was in fact the cinematic equivalent of the Second Coming, you'd jolly well believe them.

I did, for nearly thirty years.

Biggles: Adventures in Time was apparently originally intended to be far more faithful to W.E. Johns' original vision - a straight-up wartime story about a teenage flying ace. When Back to the Future became 1985's most successful film, however, a hasty re-jig was ordered to introduce elements of time travel to the plot. Thus was born the character of New York caterer Jim Ferguson, who had the misfortune to be yanked back through time whenever pilot James 'Biggles' Bigglesworth found himself in mortal danger - generally at a moment calculated to cause maximum embarrassment to Ferguson at one end of the timeline or the other. Dashed fictional war heroes - bastards, to a man.

Critics loathed it. Audiences loathed it. Nine-year-old me, however, thought it was the best film ever, watching it until the tape wore out and then, eventually, forgetting all about it until the advent of the Internet made further viewing a tantalising prospect. 

The good

The very beginning of this film feels every bit as sexy and exciting as it did when I was a kid - a low aerial shot slowly circling Lady Liberty as a series of portentous synth chords gradually build before exploding into the jagged, coruscating main theme. It's aggressive and ecstatic at once, and arguably the single greatest musical achievement of the 20th century - tell me otherwise if you like, but we'll both know you're lying.

Harder to deny, however, is the appeal of the aerial stuntwork; I'm genuinely unsure whether better flying scenes have ever been committed to celluloid. Two set-pieces in particular are genuine pulse-racers - a low-altitude biplane tag that takes place early on, and then, preceding the film's climactic confrontation, a game of hide-and-seek involving a biplane, a helicopter and a steam train. These are scenes that have had a direct impact on my life, imbuing me with a passion for flight in all forms and thus indirectly bringing me hours of joy in the years that followed.

Oh, and continuing along the highbrow theme of self-betterment through great cinema, the film is also laced with a rather endearing vein of low-grade homoeroticism that left my younger self musing at length on how sad it was that two men weren't allowed to fall in love with one another, because that would have been just perfect. This is honestly something I have never ever ever thought about any other film characters since, and especially not about any of the Avengers, X-Men or 1970s Formula 1 drivers.

The bad

There now follows a list of things I didn't care about when I was nine years old:

• Acting.
• Scripts.
• Comedy - here, it's firmly of the wacky hi-jinks variety.
• Soundtrack - why bother, when you can add instant drama whenever necessary by hitting a single key on your synth?
• Cinematography - it's easy to say nowadays that a 80s film looks as though it was filmed on someone's cameraphone, but even by standards of the period, everything other than the set-pieces looks cheap and shoddy.
• Historical accuracy - I'm not enough of an expert to even start on this one, so I won't. The Commodore looks in awfully good nick for a man who should by all rights be in his late 90s, though.
• Faithfulness to source material - even after you've left aside the time travel, apparently.
• Sexism - fairly minimal, admittedly, because the film's two named female characters have about fifteen minutes of screentime between them. Ferguson's girlfriend is definitely a screamer, though.
• Racism - saved until the end, but done with real gusto.
• Sizeism - the single larger character in the film is cowardly, lazy and eats constantly. Nice to know that's what you think of people like me, guys.

It's not offensively bad. It's not amusingly bad. It's just low-grade awful in a vaguely depressing sort of a way.

The verdict

I should probably finish this one up with some sort of moral guff about how people grow up and grow out of their childish pleasures, and how this is a good thing. Truth is, though, that I'll almost certainly go back to this one sooner or later, and I'm fine with that. Like it or not, this is a movie that's helped define who I am today - in true Boys' Own tradition, it's made me braver, and more adventurous.

...Just not necessarily any more discriminating.