The Shepherd is Disney's attempt at Christmas ghost story. In the style of Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories.

It is inspired from a novella from thriller iter Frederick Forsyth.

Ben Radcliffe plays the young RAF pilot flying over the North sea on Christmas Eve in 1957. His father too was in the air force who was shot down in World War 2.

Only the pilot encounters electrical issues, he loses communication and he is low on fuel. With no contact on the radio, total cloud cover and a few minutes of fuel remaining. He has no options but to say his prayers, have flashbacks to better days.

Suddenly he sees an old Mosquito plane and a pilot who will shepherd him to a runway.

The short film written and directed by Iain Softley is a tribute to the shepherds of the air during World War 2 that guided lost planes.

It is beautiful to look at, predictable with an emotional ending. I wonder if this would had been even more effective if it was shorter.

It is Christmas Eve, 1957, and there are cozier places to be than the cockpit of a de Havilland Vampire fighter plane. But for Freddy, the Royal Air Force pilot who has just taken off from West Germany, this single-seat jet is the only way to make it back to England for Christmas morning. His flight plan is simple; the fuel tank is full. In sixty-six minutes, he will be back in Blighty. But then the plane begins to fail. First the compass goes haywire, then the radio dies. Lost and alone above the icy North Sea, the pilot is searching for a landing strip when the East Anglican fog closes in, signaling certain death. He has given up hope when a second shadow appears-a Mosquito fighter-bomber of World War II vintage. The plane is a "shepherd," guiding the Vampire to a safe landing, and its appearance is a gift from fate, a miracle out of time-but for one lonely pilot, the mystery has just begun.

I've read the short story by Frederick Forsyth every Christmas for the last thirty years. This thirty-nine minute 'short' produced by John Travolta is a Winner. The Shepherd is a gripping, heartwarming tale for a cold winter's night. The reviewers finding this 'short' as boring have played too many video games and short-circuited a few synapses.

My best guess: anti-Disney people coming to gripe because they are told it is their identity. Interesting how essentially every 4 and below review has several egregious spelling mistakes, isn't it?

Travolta is indeed meh, weird they couldn't get him to shave, but most of his acting is far away, in a cockpit, geared up, so no big deal.

Everyone else is fine. Some of the talking to yourself is because it's a movie, hard to have internal monologues that don't seem sillier.

Cockpit lighting is wrong, but it's a movie, I guess they couldn't persuade the producers people can get by with a dark film.

I really really hate bad CGI, find the last 2 years of Marvel nearly unwatchable from that, but... no problems here. Not sure what anyone finds unbelievable, looked good to me and a delight to a Vampire on film!

Vampires were prone to electrical failures even of instruments (and the author of the original tale flew them before his writing career) but he seems to have forgotten there's a plain old magnetic compass that should have worked. About the old real flaw here, and I suspect someone could have come up with a reason it fails also, but we can just handwave that for the story as the rest tracks nicely.

While not authentic, the ghost story inside a ghost story worked well also. If you like the concept of a guardian spirit, easy to imagine that each individual ghost is in their own world and so former batsman ghost is doomed to his own life, not working in cahoots with his former master. Nice surprise.