Rover: The Long Goodbye
- Episode aired Mar 20, 2007
- 40m
IMDb RATING
7.3/10
7
YOUR RATING
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Very one sided
Rover: The Long Goodbye is a documentary charting the rise and fall of one of the UK's most famous car brands. Rather than focus in detail on the many companies which owned the name from the original Rover Car Company through British Leyland to Rover Group and finally MG Rover and cover the history and politics involved, the film instead covers Rover as a brand and it's application on various different and questionably suitable cars.
I find this to be a very short sighted and bias approach, because the documentary tends to focus on all the negative points of Rover's history, and it's use on low quality cars like the Tata Indica, while ignoring much of the good work achieved by the car makers behind it. No mention is made of the K-Series engine, or the best selling Rover of all time, the R8 200/400 series co-developed with Honda. Multiple exaggerated clips are used from Top Gear, a program presented by a man infamous for his hatred for his own domestic car maker. It is in this respect that I find The Long Goodbye fails, because it focuses completely on the shortcomings but ignores the good work which was achieved by the British firm. Perhaps this is to be expected from a documentary of this kind, but I think a fairer and more neutral assessment would have been more appropriate.
Films like this are only serving to perpetuate the already high level of disregard for our own domestic car makers in the UK. A documentary which acknowledged the successes of the firm as well as it's short comings would have been a much better film. The one part of this I did agree with was the statement that all the people who are mourning the loss of Rover only have themselves to blame for not buying them. You would never see the French destroying their own car industry, so why did it happen here? Since when has the British national hobby been destroying our own heritage?
I find this to be a very short sighted and bias approach, because the documentary tends to focus on all the negative points of Rover's history, and it's use on low quality cars like the Tata Indica, while ignoring much of the good work achieved by the car makers behind it. No mention is made of the K-Series engine, or the best selling Rover of all time, the R8 200/400 series co-developed with Honda. Multiple exaggerated clips are used from Top Gear, a program presented by a man infamous for his hatred for his own domestic car maker. It is in this respect that I find The Long Goodbye fails, because it focuses completely on the shortcomings but ignores the good work which was achieved by the British firm. Perhaps this is to be expected from a documentary of this kind, but I think a fairer and more neutral assessment would have been more appropriate.
Films like this are only serving to perpetuate the already high level of disregard for our own domestic car makers in the UK. A documentary which acknowledged the successes of the firm as well as it's short comings would have been a much better film. The one part of this I did agree with was the statement that all the people who are mourning the loss of Rover only have themselves to blame for not buying them. You would never see the French destroying their own car industry, so why did it happen here? Since when has the British national hobby been destroying our own heritage?
helpful•10
- Zeuss101
- Jan 13, 2008
Details
- Runtime40 minutes
- Color
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