Tajemnica Westerplatte

This film may be viewed as a remake of 1967's Polish classic, Westerplatte, and in some ways it is a real remake, as many scenes were very precisely reproduced, the scenery is almost identical to old black and white version. And many battle scenes are also very close to that old film. As well as some characters. Yes, full color version seems better, as well as many video FXs and some sound production. Yes, the morbid reality of deaths in action is shown pretty well, too. And then, some weaker moments creep in. The camera work is often repeating the excellent ideas of 1920. Bitwa Warszawska, but this time in a more amateur way. The heavy handed play of almost all main actors makes this already plodding film a real slow snail at a painful pace. Many moments seem very odd and totally unnecessary. What is really bad, the film often badly borders on a sheer amateurism and therefore the tragic feel of loss and failure is lost wholly. Thighs film can be watched once, for the knowledge reasons, and then quite quickly dismissed as a languid attempt at really exciting and very interesting page of History.

The movie is boring. Many well known actors doesn't help at all. They can't express action and fight of WWII. Action is chaotic. Soldiers most of the time have trouble with rifles almost like they use it first time in their life. German soldiers attack from 20 meters and they do not see polish soldiers? What do they think? Special effect are very bad and you can see they are low budget. Movie is missing camera shots from distance and panorama views of Westerplatte. Dialogs are primitive. Behavior of soldiers is nonsense. No big scenes of fight, just few people with guns. It's one of the worst movies I've seen. All this movie can be cut to 15 minutes and still will be boring. It's bad not only comparing to world standard, but also compared to other polish productions. Do not watch it.

The topic fascinated me, and seeing Polish soldiers in action is such a rare treat that I just had to buy this film. Unfortunately, many important action scenes happen off-screen, and we are just told about them later.

It almost seems as though the director was embarrassed to make a "simple" action movie, and so felt compelled to engage in psycho-drama to fill out the tale. I liked most of the actors, though, as an American, I was unfamiliar with them. I liked the sets, weapons, uniforms, and so forth.

Overall a disappointment, but a nice try.

I understand this movie was intended to start a conversation about the Westerplatte Polish national myth. Unfortunately, it fails on three fronts:

(1) It doesn't ask questions, it shoves the answer down our throats with heavy-handed character portrayals. (2) It operates on the basis of deep despair of the soldiers and mental breakdown, but it does not support it with battle scenes. (3) It engages in opaque, meandering plot twists and difficult to follow timeline changes.

Those three aspects combined make the movie seem contrived and hard to understand to outsiders.

I agree with the other reviewers who call this film "boring." It is possible to do a low budget war film that is compelling. You do that with characters you care about it. There are no characters in this one, just a bunch of guys in military uniforms. A couple of the characters are based on real life counter-parts. Unfortunately, they don't seem to act much like them. The movie is about a 7 day battle, but by day 2 the main characters are all wigging out, hallucinating, and doing things that don't make any sense. The extras were very poorly prepared for their scenes, most of them very conspicuously struggling to operate their weapons. Yet the soldiers they are portraying are Polish regulars - generally acknowledged to be among the world's best soldiers (even the Germans thought so). There is lots of moody music, and very poorly done special effects. Bolt action rifles send out bright coloured laser beams, in slow motion, I guess because the directors presume audiences are too stupid to know when people are getting shot at? The English subtitles are also poorly done and in some cases comical. Bad show all around.