Young fighter pilots fighting evil enemies and inner demons. That doesn’t sound new, and unfortunately it isn’t. At least you can see in the ZDFneo late-night program how pretty Holland is from above.
Berlin – In the first 30 seconds, the end of the hero seems inevitably to have come. The young military pilot Rutger de Man (Josha Stradowski) sits unconscious at the controls of his airplane.
The machine loses altitude, it spins, races towards the surface of the sea. A desperate voice on the radio cannot wake him.
The story of the young hothead Rutger begins so dramatically in the Dutch action series “High-Flyers”, which is very, very distantly reminiscent of the 80s movie classic “Top Gun”: Young flight students are trained to become fighter pilots at the Military Academy. Professionally and privately, they go through a tough school and are repeatedly caught up with their past. ZDFneo will broadcast the eight parts this Friday from 11:05 p.m.
Flashback. Twelve months earlier: Rutger lets himself be provoked into a car race on a forest road and ends up promptly in a police check and finally in court. The bad boy is in trouble with the law for the sixth time this week. A suspended sentence is no longer in there. The court wants to send him to prison and behavior therapy. But Rutger pulls out of the affair: Instead, he goes to the military. The Royal Dutch Military Academy trains him to become a fighter jet pilot.
In the troop, Rutger befriends Guus Walema, the son of the commander of the Dutch Air Force, Roderick Walema, and the young Turkish girl Leyla Demir. All three dream of flying the legendary F-16 fighter jet. But the way there is shaped by the tough demands of the flight school, the humiliation of the commanding officers and rivalries among each other.
During the tough training of the young recruits, a political crisis between the Netherlands and Russia comes to a head. Rutger inadvertently gets caught between the two fronts of the conflict. When deployed in Syria, he is faced with the difficult choice of either serving his government or saving the life of his friend and colleague Guus.
Fast cuts, chic flight scenes and enchanting aerial shots from the sky over Holland save this series from 2020 from crashing despite the thin plot and the weak dialogues. dpa
