Unexpectedly disappointing. Professor Childers is startlingly unfamiliar with some of the fundamental objective facts, such as the number of Japanese carriers lost at the Battle of the Coral Sea (he says 1 heavy and one light; in fact it was only the light carrier Shoho) and the fact that the initial attacks on the Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway were made by torpedo bombers, including the legendary Torpedo Squadron 8, from the USS Hornet, which lost all planes involved in that attack and all personnel except for Ensign George Gay), which he repeatedly identifies as dive-bombers. His comments on the social aspects of the war and the strategic aspects may well be entirely accurate and even quite incisive but his unfamiliarity with such elementary facts as above makes it impossible to know to what extent he can be relied upon.

An almost steam punkish Jules Vernian SF version in which Dumas immortal plot is still discernible beneath the CG and great production values. Haughty but willing virgins meet arrogant swordsmen (pun intended). Prepare to suspend your disbelief. Not up to the 1993 Charlie Sheen/Kiefer Sutherland version or even the 1978 Oliver Reed/Richard Chamberlain version, let alone the classic 1948 Gene Kelly/Lana Turner version which remains the classic but still worth the time on a rainy day.

How not to make a movie. Opens with mournful orchestral music (lots of slow violions) incomprehensible slo-mo CGs, almost 9 minutes before the first word of dialog. 2 hours, 15 minutes of jaw-dropping boredom. Long pointless scenes of the wedding reception from Hell (not funny Hell). This is an "Emperor's New Clothes" movie so trying to impress by its obvious artiness that not even a child would dare cry "This is Unwatchable!" I usually give a DVD 30 minutes to catch my attention, which isn't hard to do. This one made it to 28. And against my better judgment. Hope the actors were all well paid. Next time they need money this badly they'd find more honor in street-walking. Save 2 hours lost from your life and READ something, even a cereal box, instead!

Despite its well-respected author, this book's several clear factual errors in the early pages made it unreadable for me. For example, on page six the author made the un-footnoted assertion that the US Army had "only 51,000 trained fliers as of June of 1940. On the other hand, the Royal Air Force had 500,000 pilots, and the German Luftwaffe had a million pilots." June, 1940 was prior to the Battle of Britain during which the RAF was so desperately short of pilots that it put kids with less than 10 hours of solo time into combat, leading Churchill to say famously in the House of Commons that "Never in the course of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." Emphasize "few." I haven't checked the primary sources but I'd say the number of pilots in the RAF and the Luftwaffe are exaggerated by a multiple of about 100, somewhat less, perhaps, for the figures for the US Army.
The author also confuses the terms "warship" (a generic term for naval vessels designed primarily for combat rather than other purposes, e.g. transportation) with "battleship," traditionally the largest type of warship primarily armed with guns rather than aircraft and defined by treaty prior to WWII in terms of displacement and gun-size. On p. 16 the author states that the original "cash and carry" plan for providing support for Britain "... was radically altered so the British could 'borrow' old American battleships and other war materiel and pay the U.S. Government later." In context this appears to be the famous "Destroyers" for bases" deal in which Britian received 50 mothballed US WWI destroyers, not battleships, in exchange for 99-year leases on bases in the Western Hemisphere. These old and small destroyers were far smaller than contemporary battleships, only approximately one-twentieth their displacement. In short, battleships are warships but not all warships are battleships and battleships, although they can destroy, are not destroyers.
On page 46, the author refers to the British mounting a counteroffensive against Gen. Erwin Rommel and his 16th Panzer Division. The two panzer divisions in Rommel's Afrika Corps at that time were, famously, the 21st and the 15th, not the 16th.
These mistakes are all quite obvious to anyone with an elementary familiarity with the subject matter but escaped the author, his credited research assistant and the editor. Although perhaps relatively trivial in the broad subject matter of the book, they left me with the impression that the scholarship was less than rigorous and concerned that I might not recognize other, perhaps more important, errors.

The first of Cornwell's Shape series, actual events of Britain's Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon through the eyes of a rifle officer. A must read for the military history buff.