MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

Germany / USA / Switzerland 2001
d: Hartmut Bitomsky
Arte TV (Region 0 de)

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Wider than a football field, high as a four-storey house, the B-52 bomber is an icon of US military-industrial supremacy, or threat, depending on your vantage point. This over-long documentary blends interviews and archive footage to trace the 50-year history of the aircraft, from '50s deterrence and carpet bombing in Vietnam, through to its recent deployment in the Gulf War and Kosovo. It's best when undercutting the gleaming myth by detailing worrisome peacetime crashes and visiting the Arizona desert junkyard where the planes go to die. The po-faced, politically correct narration labours the point, however, and there's rather too much of a pretentious conceptual artist who pointedly recycles spare parts. Factually fascinating but borderline precious.
— TJ, Time Out Film Guide
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Bitomsky tries to keep his face straight, but his backhanded homage to the war plane and its position in 20th-century social history builds into a smirk. The arc of his narrative—tracing the plane's history from postwar prototype to scrap-yard corpse—is telling but loaded: a 50-year-old piece of hardware is bound to have obsolescences and attrition. Bouncing between Burns-style Americana and "Atomic Café"-type government archivals, Bitomsky is fair about the history—which means being chilled both by the aircraft's carpet-bombing successes and its cock-ups. (The most heinous of these—a mid-air refueling crash that irradiated a huge chunk of the Spanish countryside—has its own, startlingly frank exhibit in the National Atomic Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.)
That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore: For all of its ubiquity and power, the B-52 is a paltry source of irony. The film's implicit opposition—lefty peacenik us versus jingoistic baby-killing them—doesn't hold water when interviewing actual pilots and navigators. At least, it doesn't in the final quarter of 2001, when ordinary personnel can no longer be entirely dismissed as pawns in a capitalist campaign. (Only military illustrator Mike Hagel has a fetishistic gleam in his eye.) It doesn't help that the film's dialoguing narrators—a lispy man and a comatose woman—become numbingly precious, and that Bitomsky shows little visual sense beyond a breathtaking, circular helicopter audit of a B-52 graveyard in the Arizona desert.
— Michael Atkinson, Village Voice