The Cold Blue (2018) User Reviews

The Memphis Belle and Her Children

[smithpaulusmc · 8/10 · 20 November 2018]

In 1944, director William Wyler flew with the crew of the Memphis Belle, a B-17 crew who flew over 30 bombing missions over Nazi Germany, on their final mission. Wyler and his crew filmed the final flight and the Memphis Belle's journey home in his documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. Years later, Erik Nelson took the fading 16mm film and remastered it. He traveled the country and interviewed the last survivors of the 8th Air Force who flew B-17's over Germany during World War II. I caught this film at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles last week. It was Veterans Day and the crowd was filled with an air of respect.

The film recalls a youthfulness that, more often than not, died on foreign soil. Nelson and his crew remastered the colors and converted the 16mm footage to 4K so that the the film could be viewed in 16:9 widescreen. The original documentary footage had no sound, so Nelson flew on actual B-17s to capture authentic audio. The final product spins a tale that truly captures the fear and inhumanity witnessed by B-17 veterans. The throaty turbines rumble over the air while deep flack shreds both wing and wingman. The veteran interviewees' voices ring true. There is power in their voice despite the fragility of their age. These men truly were the greatest generation. Their tales will soon be all that survives.

Stunning original footage ..

[phfairways · 9/10 · 4 July 2019]

Stunning original footage with a thoughtful narrative and truly moving recollections from the few remaining veterans.. .Those ignorant enough to condemn the bombing of the third reich as a "war crime" should be sat in a chair and advised to watch this film... This campaign ,as terrible as it was ,put a stop to the V1 rockets the V2 rockets and the gas chambers .Without doubt it saved Europe at a huge cost to the young men of The USAF and RAF and should be properly remembered in exactly this way..

A mesmerizing doc

[cherry_town · 9/10 · 15 July 2019]

Frankly, I often just listen to many docs as the background while commuting or doing chores. This movie disallows you to do that, both for the respect and empathy for guys and for the video and information load the movie is charged with. Atomizing the endevour in chapters is very useful as they get embedded into memory. Fume tales from engines warning Nazis 50 miles ahead the formation is approaching. The code of Americans flying in daylight (why? never gets explained here but you could find an explanation elsewhere) while Brits did it at night. FLAK mortal danger. Red flares on airfield approach signalling there is a wounded serviceman aboard. Frostbite as flying fortresses have not been pressurized. And ever increasing number of missions which sends you back to Catch 22. In a somewhat weird way, this two great movies - Cold Blue and Catch-22 - get intrinsically intertwined.

Super super super

[qhtmike · 10/10 · 24 May 2019]

We owe so much to these boys plucked from farms, shops, and their homes to fight Hitler in Europe in 1942. These boys left home, some of them not yet 20 years old. Fighting cold, German fighters, and fear of not coming home at the end of a mission, they were the 8th Air Force flying daylight bombing missions against the German fatherland. Flying 5 hours there and 5 back while flying thru German fighters and flak to lay a few bombs on a target they may had hit the day before and the day before that too. Sometimes barely making it home with only part of a tail or on 3 engines to land and have their ground crews patch them up for the next mission. So proud of these teenagers and early 20's boys forced to grow up too fast and too early in a war they didn't start or want either.

see it

[ops-52535 · 9/10 · 9 June 2019]

Its a monumental presentation of one of the most heiroic war machines ever made, the b-17 bomber ship,and the crews using them up in the cold blue, as presented by on scene documentary makers in 1944. its a historical document of high value, most of it in colour. its a must see if your into war history thinks the grumpy old man

reminds me of "Catch-22"

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 17 June 2019]

It was a surprise to see that William Wyler (Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, Funny Girl) accompanied the US air force on a mission and got to film them in action. Must've been quite the exhilarating experience.

One thing that caught my attention was the part about their superiors raising the number of missions that they had to carry out. It reminded me of "Catch-22" (wherein the superiors keep ordering the pilots to fly more and more missions).

Anyway, "The Cold Blue" is a good documentary. A story like you can't imagine.

Fantastic

[jtpiercy · 10/10 · 9 June 2019]

A fantastic tribute to all the brave and heroic men of the 8th Air Force. I would also recommend watching the History Channel Air War.

to the person here who wrote the US "carpet bombed" Germany

[random-70778 · 21 September 2020]

The US used dangerous daylight precision bombing in Europe. There was literally ZERO carpet bombing by the Army Air corps in Europe. In a very very few cases, making up less than 0.25% of bombs dropped, city centers were bombed in specific places where war making infrastructure was absolutely and definitively present in the city centers Berlin and Frankfurt). In Japan as even Japanese war historians note, every city had war making work and small factories in the city centers. Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example were major war production and troop marshalling cities. BYW the Soviets killed WAY more civilians with artillery fired indiscriminately into city centers as they advanced westward than the Us killed with all is bombers'. US aerial bombings in Europe and especially the pacific saved ten times more lives than they took

More emotional than informational

[interestingstuff · 6/10 · 11 February 2024]

This is a documentary that focuses more on emotional side of the war than actually giving you information. As a matter of fact, the documentary contains almost no new information that most people didn't already know.

It doesn't talk about the war itself or any of the specific missions that were done within the war but mostly about how scary it was for the people involved, how they felt, how their feelings evolved over time and so on.

I found it a bit repetitive at times. How many different ways can you say "air force personnel were scared for their lives". This documentary tries to say it 20-30 different ways if not more. Every episode eventually comes down to the fact that it was scary. We get it, flying air missions during WW2 was scary, we really heard it the first 100 times. The documentary would be better off if it actually provided something beyond repeating the same point 100 times.

It looks like they had some colored videos from WW2 and they wanted to create a documentary out of those videos but they didn't really think it through and they didn't really have a plan about what they wanted to make this documentary about.

WWII hopefully the last great war

[oldgraywolf · 10/10 · 22 June 2019]

Everyone who enjoys freedom should Thank the men/women who served in WWII on & off the battlefield. These are the great people who served their country to stop the Axis powers from taking over the world. So many where lost, never to return to their families we owe them so much for sacrificing everything for so many who cherish their freedom. God Bless all service personnel who have served to preserve the greatest country, America.

Correcting the comments above

[johnanthony55 · 10/10 · 23 June 2019]

The US Air Corps did not carpet bomb German cities in WWII. The US flew dangerous daylight missions from Briton, as mentioned at the beginning of the show. However the show does not mention why. We, the US, flew bombers against industrial targets. These raids were as precise as possible, therefore the far more dangerous daylight raids. The Brits flew night raids against the population. Why? Likely as vengeance for the the Battle of Britain. The Germans flying against London, the Brits flying against German cities, neither succeeded in breaking the will of the citizens and likely hardened their commitment. So you are right in a sense, that burning a country to the ground doesn't end a war and should be considered inappropriate for war; look no further than our firebombing of targets in Japan. More Japanese civilians were killed in the bombing campaign against Japan than the two atom bombs that brought the war to an end.

So get your facts straight. Condemn the Pacific campaign, unless you feel the same racism that allowed us to burn the Japanese night after night. But don't spew nonsense about the men who flew daylight raids against German industry so that they could be as precise as possible given the technology of the era.

Ruined by the narration

[horst69 · 2/10 · 23 September 2020]

Many documentaries suffer from an abundance of interviews of contemporary witnesses ; often old people who give accounts of what they have experienced . Which could be a good thing, if only those interviews wern't almost always comically stereotypical , carefully rehearsed , and utterly boring .

This film makes those people the narrators of the entire documentary . With all due respect to the men who served , that style choice made this a pain to watch, and didn't deliver any content or information on the topic .

Not the veterans' fault at all of course, but that of directors and producers who drag out those poor old chaps to patch up their lazy work .

Outstanding

[winstonaugusta · 9/10 · 28 September 2019]

Weather you are a history buff or not, this is worthy of watching. The odds of surviving the required 25 missions was pretty slim. The old guys in the 10 man crew were barely 21 years old. More airmen of the 8th airforce died over Europe than our Marines who fought the brutal Pacific island campaign.

This documentary will not dissapoint

This is how it really was...

[RockyMtnVideo · 10/10 · 2 August 2020]

I've seen some reviews here that question the Allied Command tactics, and/or whether some of the bombing activities were appropriate, or not. This isn't a film about whether the war was prosecuted in the best possible manner (to be critiqued in "Monday morning quarterback" style), it's a documentary about the men who were given the extremely dangerous job of flying directly into the German defenses, to attempt to deliver ordinance payloads that would hopefully damage the German war machine to the degree that it would allow the allied forces to turn the tide of the war. It's about those men flying into what amounted to a shooting gallery, day after day, fully aware that their odds of survival were not much better than the odds from a typical coin toss, and yet, continuing to do so, over and over again, because they knew that their efforts "might be" enough to tilt the balance of war, just enough, so that the D-Day invasion, and subsequent push into German held territory, might have a chance of succeeding, and finally turning the war around.

If you want some insight into the risks that were taken, the sacrifices that were made, and see it "up close and personal", in amazing, restored color film footage, shot from these aircraft during their missions, then you really won't find anything better than this. And instead of just having a voice-over, done by some third-party narrator, this film is narrated by WW II veterans who flew missions in these aircraft, and hence, are giving first-hand accounts of their own experiences, comparable to the activities that were captured by the original filmmakers.

In summary, this is extraordinary footage, captured at great risk to the filmmakers who rode along on the missions, in order to capture it. It is an important, up close and personal, slice of US military history, the likes of which are rarely seen, and a real tribute to the sacrifice of so many brave flight crews who played an important part in the eventual Allied victory. It is well worth your viewing time.

About the people not the aircraft.

[dellin-38718 · 9/10 · 12 July 2019]

The Cold Blue is not a remake or restoration of William Wyler's original Memphis Belle film from 1943; it's a documentary about the people not the aircraft, and is about the price they paid. It includes some German footage and shows some of the terrible consequences of war on the ground and in the air. Wyler's original 16mm colour footage has been remastered in 4K HD and they have added a sound track, voice-overs and specially recorded Foley. Although it was a simpler process, the result is much more convincing than Peter Jackson's colourisation of archive film from the First World War. I was particularly struck by a couple of airmen who were sporting black eyes and by the black bursts of flak that resembled mushrooms or sinister octopuses. The film doesn't fly straight and level from A to B, but weaves traditional documentary tropes of rostrum work, voice overs, talking heads and the original film into chapters, and it's edited to feel like the viewer is watching archived clips. The 'making of' section and the before and after restoration comparisons were interesting but I'm not sure the section on Richard Thompson's music added to the film. However, scenes showing veterans viewing the restored footage, which were used to spark their recollections, reassures the viewer that the filmmakers got it right. Refreshingly, The Cold Blue acknowledges that the United States Army Air Force engaged in area bombing. The film is also not scared of allowing the veterans' testimony to contradict each other. While one veteran says he was never scared, another claimed that everyone was frightened and anyone who says any different is deluded.

Outstanding restoration work.

[progmetaldrums · 8/10 · 23 August 2019]

The amount of painstaking effort put into restoring this film is evident. Seeing these very old images in colour adds another dimension to it. My only beef; why do filmmakers still insist on using the Stuka sound effect? The original footage has no audio so sound effects are added. The Stuka sound effect (like the rifle bullet ricochet sound) is one of the most over-used sound effects in film history. I wish they hadn't used it in this film and gone for a more realistic approach. Otherwise, I quite enjoyed this film.

Excellent footage

[justicejvm · 8/10 · 26 August 2019]

Very well put together, really moving and detailed

Could have been better

[dncorp · 5/10 · 7 June 2019]

Was not as Great as D-Day The Untold Stories 2019

Historical Facts

Was still the U.S. Army Air Corps until became the U.S. Air Force 18 September 1947 AFTER World War 2. They were still U.S. Army Soldiers not U.S. Air Force "Airmen".

Due to the 1918 Spanish Influenza that killed most from ages 9 to 40 most of those Drafted at the beginning of World War 2 were "OLD" men. Like the High School Teacher depicted by Saving Private Ryan. There were Many World War 1 Veterans that fought during World War 2 (The Big Red One 1980). After most of the "Old Men" were killed in Combat during the Beginning of World War 2, after the Teens became 18 to 21, the U.S. started "Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel" as to how so many 17 to 24 year Olds ended up on the 1944 Beaches of Normandy and NOT the U.S. Army Air Corps 1942-1943 (average Age 24 to 26).

Unfortunately, most "Leaders" still had the idea of NO Strategy and Tactics, and were sending as many as possible in Human Wave Charges just like World War 1's "Trench Warfare" against many Machineguns. The same is what happened with the U.S. Army Air Corps, "Massive Bombing Raids" as a "Duck Shoot" for the Enemy Anti Aircraft Guns, kind of like the World War 1 Human Wave Charges.

"High Altitude Bombing" was very inaccurate, required many aircraft to repeatedly do many missions over and over until target destroyed. During High Altitude Bombing "Runs" the Pilot and Co Pilot were Required to maintain a straight line flight, altitude, and speed, making them very easy to get shot down as seen for many Miles away because they were flying so high. During the 1942 Doolittle Raid the B-25 flying Low Level Bombing, were very accurate as there was no "Bomb Glide Slope Angle", No Windage, No Lead Time, nor any other Factors that would cause the Bombs to miss the assigned Targets. Because the Doolittle Bombers were flying so low by the time the Enemy saw them coming over the Horizon the U.S. Bombers were already miles behind the Enemy Anti Aircraft.

What A Beautiful Tribute

[helenahandbasket-93734 · 10/10 · 30 August 2020]

What we need more of is more these guys and less of the whining cancel crowd.

When you have the realization that life is bigger than your small familial circle and your feelings are insignificant in comparison, you wind up with them greatest generation'.

God bless these men and their families, especially the 28k that never returned home.

Amazing documentary

[Bootstrap_Paradox · 10/10 · 31 December 2019]

Favorite WW2 documentary to date. I encourage everyone to watch this.

A story about real hero's !

[Jasonkenny-175-773764 · 9/10 · 5 August 2022]

A remarkable story about remarkable men, doing what they had to do, at the time unknowing they'd be remembered as real hero's - I love a REAL story about real hero's !

Fantastic

[moneil-57689 · 9/10 · 25 May 2019]

Not quite as good as the recent WWI documentary, but very well done!!!

Tales from the Greatest Generation

[jcoffee02 · 10/10 · 8 October 2021]

This film focuses on the men who served in the 8th Air Force and their missions flying B-17 bombers during WWII. Any philosophical arguments concerning the right or wrong of their mission is theoretical in hindsight, and pales in the focus of the men portrayed, risking everything to thwart Hitler's design for world domination.

The restored footage and commentary by the last of the participants makes this documentary one of a kind and, possibly, the last of its kind.

Richard Thompson's understated score still manages to bring a sense of majesty and introspection to the images. The soundtrack is well worth a listen, as is the Making Of feature detailing the restoration process.

A film about boys that did what they were told

[hamzajasarevic · 4/10 · 14 June 2019]

The carpetbombing of Germany was a war crime, the civil casualties were not neglible, they were not collateral, they were intended. In one scene one of the narrators says how one of his crewmembers was pitchforked to death and how someone could kill a human like that. I ask myself how someone could bomb civilians to anihilation, kill thousands in one bomb run by explosion and fire. The soldiers that are telling the story were not guilty then, but are now if they dont aknowledge the crimes, as their enemys after the war did, and are doing it untill today. It is a great movie on the mindset of young men going to war, ignorant and naive

Another worst film! Full of annoying overuse scene! Bored to freaking death!

[kwenchow · 1/10 · 5 March 2021]

This film start with a man "Bud" singing, and a video footage about the 8th Air Force scene! As turnout, this film is about the 8th Air Force B-17 pilots' mission in Germany! Entire film quite slow, and full of annoying overuse scene! Such as, overuse of the narration scene, overuse of the airplane flying scene, overuse of the blackout scene, and overuse of the article scene! Make the film unwatchable! At the end, a bunch of survive B-17 pilots been interviewed! Still have a post credit scene! A video footage of Bud's interview! That's it! Wasting time to watch!