And time is not on his side: There’s only one week on the calendar with a high enough water level and a bright enough moon to make the raid count.
The British inventor, Wallis (Michael Redgrave), successfully designs the bomb, but there’s a catch: It can only hit its target by skipping across the water like a stone, a feat made possible only if the bombers are flying perfectly level, at just the right height, just the right speed, and just the right distance for it to bump gently into the wall of the dam and then sink down the right depth to blow it the hell up. The trouble is that they are built so solidly as to be impervious to all but an apocalyptic carpet bombing, and they’re deep behind enemy lines. The dams provide water and power to an entire arm of the Third Reich’s industrial infrastructure, and busting them will well and truly fuck Hitler’s couch.
The most direct precursor to A New Hope’s starfighter combat (in that it, at times, seems to have been ripped off wholesale) is 1955’s The Dam Busters, a story based on an actual Royal Air Force squadron’s mission to develop and successfully deploy a top secret bomb made for the sole purpose of smashing a pair of dams. And Lucas was born into a time when many rah-rah, effects-heavy war stories in cinema focused on their exploits. “Knights of the Air,” they’ve been called. As the world wars introduced new, unfathomably cruel weapons to the battlefield, fighter pilots were lionized at the same time. Operating a military vehicle that can fall out of the sky if you’re bad at driving it is difficult, and dogfighting-the aerial battles between fighters-requires so many different skills and physical demands at the same time that it seems superhuman. Your stereotypical fighter aircraft pilot is a cocky hotshot, but one we think of (fairly or not) as smarter than a lowly grunt. Some on the field, and some on the towers.” Besides the usual intriguing questions about just where such a story could go, it’s also exciting to think what you could do with a movie focused fully on space laser dogfighting action. And so, one of the most exciting announcements about Star Wars’ future to come out recently was that Patty Jenkins (director of the Wonder Woman movies) will direct a movie about Rogue Squadron, the storied X-Wing squad from the movies and numerous other spin-off properties.
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