Allied|Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath — a picnic under a sky full of barrage balloons

Halfway through the film the war briefly stops mattering. Max and Marianne take their daughter up onto a London hill and spread a blanket, and for a few minutes the story is just a family on grass, with the city laid out below them.

The hill is Parliament Hill, the southeastern shoulder of Hampstead Heath, and it is one of the few locations in Allied that plays itself. The production did not have to invent the view. From the benches at the top you can still see most of what the camera saw, minus the wartime dressing: the ground falls away in one long slope toward the ponds, and the skyline runs east toward Archway and Highgate.

This is public land, and has been protected since the 1870s, which is why it survived to be filmed at all. Kite-flyers use the summit most weekends. The Heath's swimming ponds are ten minutes' walk north.

The scene works because Zemeckis lets it run long, and because the audience already knows what is coming for these two. Go up at the end of an afternoon, sit on the crest where the paths converge, and watch the light go orange over the towers in the distance. It is an ordinary London view, and the film's whole argument is that ordinary is the thing worth losing everything for.