'The Shepherd' is a good example of what happens when you take a perfectly agreeable ghost story and allow celebrity vanity and lousy writing to bludgeon the charm and subtlety out of it.
I don't propose to rehash the plot of the novella here and I haven't read it for a few years. Suffice to say (spoiler alert), there is no chrystal-clear, cockpit-to-cockpit eye or voice contact between the two pilots in the original. This is jammed in to give John Travolta the chance to play with someone else's aeroplane and grab some screen-time.
The old geezer who welcomes our hero to RAF Minting is real in the original, rather than a spectre conjuring runway lights and coal fires out of the ether.
The mystery is singular and is given room to breathe in the novella. In this adaptation, even the wordy, subtle-as-a-housebrick exposition comes from a second ghost. Wow.
The script wouldn't cut the mustard on a daytime soap. It's saturated with clunky exposition and jarring anachronisms, and the writers clearly knew little about the subject matter.
Final gripe: a postscript starts, 'in the Second World War hundreds of pilots from many countries lost their lives'. I assume they meant to say, '.... hundreds of thousands of aircrew....'.
This production wears its ignorance on its sleeve.
I don't propose to rehash the plot of the novella here and I haven't read it for a few years. Suffice to say (spoiler alert), there is no chrystal-clear, cockpit-to-cockpit eye or voice contact between the two pilots in the original. This is jammed in to give John Travolta the chance to play with someone else's aeroplane and grab some screen-time.
The old geezer who welcomes our hero to RAF Minting is real in the original, rather than a spectre conjuring runway lights and coal fires out of the ether.
The mystery is singular and is given room to breathe in the novella. In this adaptation, even the wordy, subtle-as-a-housebrick exposition comes from a second ghost. Wow.
The script wouldn't cut the mustard on a daytime soap. It's saturated with clunky exposition and jarring anachronisms, and the writers clearly knew little about the subject matter.
Final gripe: a postscript starts, 'in the Second World War hundreds of pilots from many countries lost their lives'. I assume they meant to say, '.... hundreds of thousands of aircrew....'.
This production wears its ignorance on its sleeve.