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.
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.