sbierly Review of Castles in the Sky

Castles in the Sky (2014)

Frustrating attempt at telling a engineering military history story

[6/10 · 21 February 2021]

I enjoy historical dramas, many good ones these days--this is not one of them. I'm also an electrical engineer, so the story of the invention of radar had great promise to me. Sadly, this movie was almost as disappointing to me as the movie Monuments Men was, except in that case they had a good book to screw up, here I guess they just winged it (pun intended). The villain's are caricature, the history is mostly skipped over, and the engineering is as much a façade as a town in an old Western movie. Worse, they can't decide if it's about human relationships, history, war, or technology, not to mention occasionally attempting but failing to be a comedy. It basically fails across the board. Except--well, it's quite lovely to look at, and I enjoyed being given even a rather silly tour of an important moment in history and in engineering. It kindled my interest to read more, and for all these reasons I upgrade it to 6 stars. In other words, it's worth seeing, but don't expect much.