An interesting film, and easily one of the most relevent to my particular project. It has of course the the vibe that it is indeed from the 70's with the gentlemenly undertones of most of the actors, and not to mention the special effects which made me chuckle from time to time.
The plot itself was good, I didnt really expect the film to be like it was, in all honesty i did not know what to expect when watching it. one of the really good parts of the film was the breif history of flight and mans early inventions to achieve it, listing about 13 different inventions and how they all failed, before the Wright Brothers finally got it right.
To my suprise the antagonist of the film was actually the owner of the airship Albatros, which is the worlds first and only ship/aircraft of its kind. a giant aircraft with many decks and decoration like an ordinary ship, only it flys in the sky with 4 dozen proppeller blades on top of the ship. The ship interestingly enough was mostly made from a paper derivative, mixed with clay and combined in a hydrolic press to make it light but still durable.
The plot of the film, is that the antagonist has a giant near invulnerable airship landed in the mountain crater at Penyslvania, the repairs on the ship and the use of the "voice amplifier" make the people of the town believe there is a volcano erupting or some other such calamity. The protagonist group go to explore the crater in a hotair balloon that has a furnace on board and a rather shallow gondola. when they approach the crater they are shot down by rockets and fall unconscious, during this time they are taken aboard the antagonists airship but are treated as guests rather than prisoners, allowed to come and go around the ship as they please.
The 4 protagonists became allarmed and questioned the nature of the ship when they saw the ship had an armoury, not long after the ship commenced a bombing run on an american sail warship. which again, juding from the airships design I expected to see a metal clad ship not a wooden sailing wariship instead, i was suprised again by this.
The Antagonist wishes to use the albatross to end all wars in the world by destroying all craft designed for warfare, saying he has no grudge against any one nationality, because he himself claims to be a "citizen of the world".
After dropping propoganda leaflets onto london ordering the british government to disarm all weapons and dispand all armies, he then bombs the fleet of warships docked in the Thames river and begins to travel the world, visiting all the major cities and doing the same thing.
the protagonists attempt to escape when the ship is rumoured to be landing to take on water for continued flying, however one of them, knowing that the ship intends to use a kind of snorkel device informs the captain of their plans, to save their life, knowing that if they had decieded to jump from the airship, they would surely have perished. the others believed him to have betrayed them and things seem hopeless once again.
during a bomb run the ablatross was damaged, and its captain was injured. the topside proppellers became sluggish and the airship began to fall slowly, after restoring the power the airship anchored itself off the coast of an island and began to make emmergency repairs.
Eventually all misunderstandings between the 4 protagonists are cleared up and the 4 of them manage to set a bomb in the armoury while the ships crew performed the emergency maintenace on the topside propellers, they then escaped down the anchor rope to the ground, while being fired upon, two of them being shot multiple times in the process, the captain orders their retrieval and the crew use the anchor wire to pull the airships down closer to the ground, but before they do the protagonists cut the rope and the airship zips back into the sky and shortly after that the bomb explodes doing irepperable damage to the albatross, regretably the captain orders all to abandon ship, he then sits in his chair on the bridge intending to go down with the ship.
at the end all the crew decided not to abandon the captain, but stay with him to the end, and for that he thanked them and began speaking from the bible shortly before the airship burst into flames and crashed into the sea and sunk.
All in all it was a good film and I enjoyed it and would easily recommend it to any fan of airships.
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