There's a good indication that this is a team effort, with solid contributions from Karl Davies, Iain McKee and Celyn Jones, but the responsibility hangs heavy upon Izzard's mobile shoulders. Here invention is treated as a mystery, small analogies from cricket on the beach to discarded bottles on the lawn explaining the incremental steps towards a system that works. is worthy, entertaining, but suffers in places from a heavy-handedness that includes Julian Rhind-Tutt and David Hayman's performances as gate-keeping ministerial apparatchiks, Tim McInnerny's jowly Churchill, and a bit where the name of the film is said in serious tones as the music swells.Ĭastles In The Sky would seem to owe a debt to 1942's First Of The Few but the latter's clumsiness and occasional lack of detail are tempered by the fact that it was an active component of the propaganda war as much as it was a document about the birth of the Spitfire. All wee gestures and cocked head, a soft Scots that recalls Robin Williams' Mrs Doubtfire, it's a solid performance that serves a film that doesn't quite work.Ĭastles. The meteorologist turned electronic pioneer is played by Eddie Izzard, fresh from her recent stage tour and a turn as one of NBC's Hannibal's menagarie of menace. Radio detection and ranging, one of the first acronyms to enter popular consciousness, credited to one of one of the hundreds of men whose inventions incrementally ratcheted us towards the headlong futurity of the modern age Sir Robert Watson Watt.
In an era when conventional military wisdom held that "the bomber will always get through", in that brief-pre-nuclear window where conventional military wisdom had not been replaced by Strangelovian excess, when men wore school ties and everything had valves, there was radar.