In recent years, there have been a huge number of films offering strange mash-ups that combine things that really have no reason being combined. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a great example. And, there also have been films with alternate realities—where the rules of the franchise can be changed. The recent Star Trek films clearly fall into this category. While such bizarre reinventions might be entertaining, films like P-51 Dragon Fighter would seem to indicate that these trends have about run their course
and thankfully so.
In this bizarre film, dragons, yes dragons have been brought into a WWII film. But it must be an alternate reality also because so much of the history in the film is wrong. P-51s did not serve in North Africa (and if they had, they wouldn't have been the late models you see in the film), V-2 rockets were not launched until well after the North African campaign, black men unfortunately did NOT serve on the front lines with whites and folks would have had different haircuts and no beards—because it was the 1940s, not 2014. But considering there are freaking dragons, I guess bad history isn't exactly a huge problem here.
The film begins with a couple soldiers having a punch each other in the face contest to see who is the most manly (I am not kidding about this ridiculously macho scene—it IS in the movie). The film then shows that a cult of weirdo sorceresses and some Nazis are working together to control dragons that they recently discovered. These dragons work for the Germans and sport cool German insignias. They can out-fly the best American planes of the day and look unstoppable. It looks like the Allies are screwed until they assemble a group of about 8 pilots to take on the dragons. Considering that they COULD have had thousands of planes and pilots at their disposal, it IS odd they'd go with these 8 and it's also odd that they were NOT all American pilots but a United Nations sort of group (I guess the film was trying to be politically correct). At the same time these pilots take on the dragons, an equally tiny group of Allied commandos attack the dragon enclave on the ground. Again, they could have sent in 50,000 troops
but that many men mean a much higher budget than this low-budget film would have allowed.
So is the film any good? Well, I liked the music
.and the CGI was nice.
The bottom line is that P-51 is indeed a bad movie—and this should come as no surprise to anyone (except, perhaps, the folks who made the film). It does have some decent production values and might be of interest to the really undemanding and possibly demented film buff. My only worry is that if the film manages to somehow make money that we'll see even weirder mash-ups. What's next—Cavemen with Nukes, Jesus and Gandhi Versus Hitler or perhaps The Obaminator--where we learn that our president is a robot sent from the future to wipe out mankind?!
