Mostly lovely pictures but a truly TERRIBLE script and OILY, unctous voice which, to me, is utterly meretricious. My first thought was that it was all a spoof. By half way through, I was still waiting for the punch line.
If the script had been plain speaking - not that awful heavy handed Public Relations tosh - then I might have liked it. But the voice would also have to have been plain speaking. Just honest 'British' and straight forward, that's what pax associate with BA. The kind of oil that was ladled onto this is the way the Americans make their airline TV adverts.
But the public relations people can't resist trying to make it 'dream like' and 'aspirational'. They had all the genuine components of their history there and threw them away. There was nothing innovative about this, just the usual self satisfied corporate splurge. It reeked of fat cats and board rooms, not the staff who actually deliver the service. If I worked for BA, or was a shareholder, I'd be well cheesed off at the waste of money.
It's also a terrible waste of an opportunity. When you think about the magnificent winking island advert? This will win no awards at all. it's just complacent dwang (as we say in South Africa!).
I would insist that it is a pi$$ take but it's too horrible for that. You know the big men sitting around the big table in their big chairs have smiled on this fictional image of their company and believe it to be so.
The single most amusing thing is the abscence of Airbus machines! They over play Concorde and the 744 is still shown centre stage. Now that is reasonable, given that they are one of the world's largest operators of the type, but having shown so many other types?
They show BEA (perhaps because the merger was govt forced) but none of the other airlines they bought up and the good names they used.
The computer work on the scenery is good, although heavy handed. For example, in the VC10 sequence, they over egg it by pasting too many of them into the shot, I would say. I'm glad that the Shuttleworth Collection appear to have made money out of this. No one comes out of this well, in my not humble opinion.
