"The Battle in the Clouds" (a.k.a. "Airship Destroyer") is a really amazing film to watch. After all, even though its special effects are incredibly crude by today's standards, it was exciting stuff back in 1909 and must have really wowed audiences. In addition, much of what you see was sci-fi for the time but would be used just a few years later in WWI! Historically speaking, this is an incredible film.During the course of the film you have no idea what the nationalities are of either side and I assume this is to increase the distribution of the film. No use offending anyone. Ironically, the version of this French film I saw bore a German title! It begins with some folks launching a blimp. It's not a Zeppelin sort of thing but looks more like a pointed sausage suspending a platform. There is no way this small balloon would provide enough lift for the guys but that's part of the charm. In fact, you see lots of blimps bouncing about--all little sausage-like things. But the main one is bad, as the crew start raining down bombs on the poor people below. Here is where it gets really creepy. Some inventors down below bring out their hardware to try to knock down the blimp--including a crude tank-like armored car, an airplane and a propeller-driven guided missile!! It's really amazing stuff and rather exciting for the day.If you see this film and don't know that this sort of stuff predates the use of such equipment in war and you don't know how crude special effects were back in the day, then you probably won't be that impressed. However, as a retired history teacher and film nut, I was simply blown away by this movie.

This is a cracking little film from the pioneering days of cinema (just over a decade after the Lumiéres). It's not exactly science fiction, more a vision of what-might-be given the technology of the day. So we have fleets of airships bombing civilian targets, and an armoured car/tank firing ground-to-air missiles in an effort to destroy them.Our hero has developed what we would now call a drone: a pilot-less aircraft capable of locking on to a target. He has proposed to the love of his life but her father turns him away. The girl's home is destroyed in the air-raid. Our hero rescues her and her father from the wreckage then returns to destroy the raiders with his new technology. He gets the girl, of course, but I'm not sure whether father was dead and out of the way or just willing to have a brilliant inventor for a son-in-law.Of course the special effects are primitive but the shot of a burning church is still a distant ancestor of the destruction of the Empire State Building by Roland Emmerich. You can see the film at www.freemoviescinema.com. Have a look. It's worth a few minutes of your time.

Airship Destroyer, The (1909) *** (out of 4)Early science-fiction film (some consider it the first) about a Zeppelin that takes off in the night where three men use it to drop bombs on England. I guess you could call this an early "fear" film as it's pretty clear that it was made to put fear into people watching the film that an invasion could come from the sky at anytime without any notice. I really don't agree that this is a science-fiction film but for some reason people consider it one. The special effects for the most part are pretty good with one great shot of the Zeppelin off in the distance while another one, with actors that we can see, comes floating in the shot. The ending doesn't hold up very well due to some obvious effects but it's still fairly impressive for 1909. Original German title: Der Luftkrieg Der Zukunft.

It is frequently and falsely claimed that Porter created the story picture in THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. Melies was creating such films already, most notably in A TRIP TO THE MOON. Likewise, D.W. Griffith did not invent cross-cutting, although he did establish its usage as standard and produced what Lillian Gish called "the grammar of film." Here is evidence that he was not working alone.This short film, based on a Verne novel, imagines the course of a future war, in which dirigibles are used to bomb cities. Although primitive by today's standards, it is clearly an epic picture and well worth the time of anyone with curiosity about the origins of film.