The Great War

I understand the importance of highlighting forgotten issues. And the effort made into doing so.

But honestly. This movie is really really bad.

So bad that it became funny.

A spectacled German sniper, just standing there, beside a tree. It made me spit out my coffee (okay okay, it was beer). German soldiers falling like flies with a few gunshots. Enemies meeting each other on a straight (!) path just staring at each other, then starting to shoot and charge. Blood that looks a lot like the ketchup I had earlier on my food.

Bates Wilder did a pretty good job though. Perlman and Zane... no idea what they were doing there.

Again, all respect for the historical references and the sacrifices that have been made at the time in the Great War.

But I'm looking at not just the message, but also at the movie.

And quite frankly, this movie sucks.

Just skip the positive reviews, reading those for this movie is just a waste of time, actually just like watching this movie, just don't bother as there are tons of better war movies. The acting isn't good at all, below average, mediocre at best. The two names Ron Perlman and Billy Zane are just poster fillers, they have minor roles. But besides the acting it's the story that is really poorly executed, maybe it could have been something with a good director and better actors, but in this case it's pretty lame. The fighting scenes are just ridiculous, it just feels like somebody was filming a bad reenactment of a battle in the woods, or filming his friends playing paintball or so. If any of those characters would have served in the war they would be dead after one second. Just skip this movie, trust me it's not worth your time.

It's just a really bad remake of Saving Private Ryan. The bunker scene without the bunker, the same church scene without the church, the same first meeting of private ryan just without a tank, the same scene deciding to fight just without a rustic French village and if i'm not mistaken the same music and dialog. Obviously the writer/director would get a F if this was a school assignment which it looks like, but in the real world I'm surprised he hasn't been sued by Steven Spielberg.

Terrible. First "battle"-scene: Soldiers supposed to storm an enemy position basically jog lazily along the top of the trenches, in daylight, no cover smoke or anything, only waiting to get cut down one by one by a german "machine gunner" who obviously never held anything even slightly resembling a machine gun in his entire life, shaking an trembling stupidly in an attempt to make us believe he is experiencing recoil (he is even totally out of sync with the actual fire rate as we hear it). All the uniforms and all the equipment look brand new and unused, even after the men wearing them get shot to pieces and blown up by "mortar shells" (impact blast radius: 2 meters). No visible injuries or blood, except for when the director obviously mid-battle remembers that there must be some, so the surprisingly and consistently boring camera angle suddenly shows some hands and feet neatly spread out on the ground. The soldiers say things like "they´re tearing us to pieces" and "not a place I would like to stay for very long". An US officer is supposed to freak out and lose it in the face of battle, but when one of the black soldiers (yes, they are the heroes in this story) hit him in the face twice, he snaps out of it and seems completely fine going forward. All forgotten now thanks to the slaps. (What makes everything even more annoying, is that the guy playing the officer does a really good job. It must feel bitter having to waste your talent on this arrogant trash production.) You get the idea. Don´t waste a minute on this. I feel like I´m watching some mob money laundering project where everyone basically just wants to get the hole production overwith and go back to what ever they´re doing in real life.

The Writer is the Director - if the two roles had been separate then one would have picked up on the many historical inaccuracies, particularly in the dialogue, where many of the phrases spoken are things that have been common language in the last decade, not 100 years ago. Other aspects, such as the over-familiarity between the ranks were simply not the way it was...