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Just saw this move as well. I guess in a vacuum it would be relatively solid, if by-the-numbers in terms of acting, plot, and cinematography, bit in context it's just complete poo poo. I actually wonder whether this saw significant editing after some test audiences or something. It seems like every now and then it just barely flirts with attempts at some ambiguity, only to them immediately veer away in a hurry going "nope, everything's actually fine". Like the time his superiors call him in about iraqi accusations about him being indiscriminate in terms of shooting, but all of a sudden that's immediately waved away and never heard from again. Same with the dead child at the beginning, the dude mopes about it for all of half a minute (and in a rather selfish manner to boot) and then the movie promptly forgets about it. The whole subplot about Mustafa the sniper seems to have been intended to draw some parallels between the two of them to humanise the Iraqis, but once again it was only the barest stub of a suggestion that never went anywhere. Also jesus christ what was up with those punisher emblems on their uniforms. It's basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU without even the slightest hint of self-awareness.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:53
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Snowman_McK posted:Then, in the last battle, hundreds of elite German soldiers just throw themselves at a fixed position. It works well at first. It was a great battle scene. Then it just went on too goddamn long. It was long enough that I started to see the seams, I started to wonder just why these Germans were so stubborn about attacking this position from the same direction. I started to spot contrivances of the scene, like the guys who are literally 3 metres away firing no weapons, just running so that Pitt can casually shoot them. The Germans forget about those really effective anti tank weapons they handed out to children in the first act. They forget that they actually have guns for much of it. I can agree with the general thrust of that complaint, but there's one particular thing that's being brought up regularly that I'd disagree with: If I remember correctly, nowhere in the movie it's ever stated that the battallion is in any way elite. All it does say is that they're SS, which I'd argue is mostly supposed to minimise any moral ambiguity by drawing a connection to the mostly SS-perpetrated crimes we'd seen up to that point. Essentially it's to impress upon the viewer that those guys really have it coming, so to speak. While towards the beginning of the war there were a bunch of elite Waffen-SS formations, the same does not necessarily hold true in 1945. They might as well have been a highly motivated but completely untested rear-line police unit pressed into frontline duty as a last resort. The movie even makes a point of showing that they're pretty poorly supplied, having only two crates of (usually rather ubiquitous) panzerfausts left. It's still a bit of an annoyance, but I'd say the segment works better if you watch it with the perspective that you're seeing a bunch of people with little to no experience facing an unknown obstacle in the middle of the night. Fog of war, and all that. Arguably you could also read it as an act of hubris on the SS-commander's part, a conviction that with their obvious superiority they should be able to just brush aside a single obstacle like that in one swoop by virtue of esprit alone, rather than take the "cowardly" option of circumventing it entirely. They were also under a certain degree of time pressure, as the bulk of the american forces were set to reach that same crossing on the very next day, which would have contributed to that stance.
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Feb 18, 2015 15:00
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