An inventor is working on a novel weapon when a fleet of enemy airships are sighted. An armoured car equipped with an anti-aircraft gun is dispatched but is destroyed, as is the biplane that attempts to shoot down one of the marauding airships. After the home of the inventor's girlfriend is bombed and the local cathedral goes up in flames, the inventor finally launches his 'aerial torpedo', a rocket-assisted, propeller-driven, surface-to-air UAV that damages the gas bag of the enemy ship, causing it to crash in pieces into a lake. For a short, the film has a strong narrative flow and a lot happens in seven minutes. The first science fiction film made in England, 'The Airship Destroyer' is also the first film in the 'military science-fiction' sub-genre and is remarkably prescient. Although military use of airships had been predicted by H.G. Wells (among others), Booth's film predates the first actual aerial attack by two years (a bomb was dropped on Turkish troops from an Italian airplane in Libya on November 1, 1911). Although surface-to-air missiles came much later and were dramatically different from Booth's contraption, the basic concept was correct and ahead of its time. The film's special effects, a mix of models, full-size props, cut-outs, and background paintings, are quite novel and effective for the era. There were few intertitles on the version I watched (on-line) but the story was not difficult to follow, and the score, although clearly not original, was fine. Typical of silent films, the acting is overly-dramatic and stagy, but the film is still entertaining and well-worth watching. The following year Booth directed another 'future weapon' story 'The Aerial Submarine', then returned to the future of strategic bombing in 'The Aerial Anarchists' (1911), which sadly has been lost.
Review of The Battle in the Clouds
