World War II in Color: The British Story (2002)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Produced by Stuart Binns and Lucy Carter

Features:

• Additional Letters and Diaries
  
• Timelines
  
• Bonus Footage
  
• British WWII Posters
  

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the what is arguably the largest scale war of the 20th Century. And, this is one of the first wars in which the motion picture camera was used to such an extent. However, most of the footage that was taken was in black and white. Recently, though, there have been more and more discoveries of rare color footage of this war. This DVD focuses on the impact of the war on the people of Great Britain, who literally had the war come to them via the air.

I think that pretty much everyone would agree that WWII was not a walk in the park, right? I mean, we all know that the men and women involved were deeply effected. So, I was a little more than upset by the narration of these documentaries on this DVD. Rather than just telling the story, our vocal guide seemed to be trying to emphasize how bad it really was with every sentence of the narration. Couple that with the fact that the persons hired to read the various letters and diary entries sounded like they were trying to do the same thing, it just makes for a really weak documentary. It was bad, worse than we can imagine--we get it, now lay off. The only thing this DVD has going for it is the amazing color footage of WWII that is captured.

The special features are more like what the main content should have been like. There are several great period documentaries to be found here. There are more letters and diary entries, too, but I'm afraid they're no better than the ones in the main feature. The timeline is a nice entry, but it's really not the kind of thing you want to have to go to your DVD player to access if you ever needed it. Perhaps this would have been better in DVD-ROM format instead.

All in all, I would say that it's nice to have this footage saved in DVD format; it's just too bad that the way they put it all together couldn't have been more well done. For that reason alone, I say that it's really not worth the rental. Only someone who wants access to this footage should buy, everyone else should wait until someone puts together a better package.