Parents' Guide to Britain and the Blitz

What Britain and the Blitz does well is recall a time of stress and worry in the history of Great Britain and the largely indomitable spirit it temporarily produced in response. Through the use of a diary written at the time, speeches by Winston Churchill—the prime minister and the British people's chief cheerleader—as well as colorized archival footage, a narrative is created that covers the way the British people dug in and refused to capitulate, in stark contrast to nearby France's quick surrender to Nazi Germany's invasion threat. Britain promised to go down fighting and, in the end, its collective pluck, along with the entry of the Americans and Russians into the war, brought down Germany.

The action begins with a disclaimer: The images are edited together to create "an immersive experience," not to represent sequential reality. That means the filmmakers falsify in order to create an overall "true" story. We learn little about military strategy, about why bombing targets were chosen, about why Britain and the rest of the world were caught flat-footed when the Germans attacked. Some may have little sympathy for Britain after its long history of imperialism and suppression in India and other places. Nevertheless, this film does convey a moment in history when a large majority of a country's population banded together in a united effort to fight a common foe. For a few years, people put aside their differences and pulled together, a phenomenon that may seem foreign to young people today.