Passchendaele

Passchendaele is part unabashed romance and part horrific and quite graphic war story.

In film World War One has been a neglected war compared to the more morally unambiguous Second World War and the more recent Vietnam War. And films that aren't about American participation are just as neglected. Passchendaele fills that void.

The movie moves quickly and switches between home life and battlefield with surprising ease and effect. I was not bored for a moment of this movie. The movie will make you care about these people when they are at home living their lives and then fear for them at war. While the battle scenes are quite brutal, they are not sensational or exploitive, since to have made them sensational or exploitive would defeat the great effort this movie takes in showing how men had to cope with life after the war and the memories of what they lived through.

Undoubtedly there will be cynics who will decry some moments as contrived or melodramatic, but these are the small-minded who have missed the real emotion of this film. The movie is great entertainment, but there is something going on beneath the surface. This is the first time I can recall a film where the main character is someone who has been both emotionally damaged by the war, but does not succumb to it. I suspect there must be many men coming out of the war who were damaged, but quietly lived with that damage their entire lives. For that depiction alone, this is a great movie.

The movie is not without humour and it has one of the funniest seduction lines I've ever heard uttered by a woman in a movie.

The movie is entertaining, but there's a lot going on and much I haven't mentioned as I don't want to click the spoiler warning. There are scenes I'm still thinking about, which doesn't happen with every movie I see.

Passchendaele is a decent World War One film, one of the best out there and there's not too many it has minor flaws but does the job brilliantly. Paul Gross has done a great job acting in and directing this film. Some may be put off by the love story but for me this just reinforces and shows the losses of many people during this time period and era. Passchendaele shows how many people who once lived to together as neighbors are divided by stupid things like family nationality and false loyalty and bad promises of adventure and glory.

The love story isn't for everyone but wow many girlfriends and wives lost partners and how many young men never came home to true love or had a chance to live full lives? This film does get you thinking!

Of course this is no Band Of Brothers in terms of scale (I know that's World War Two) but Paul Gross has done extremely well acting and directly. I find this film to be a good tribute to his Grandfather and to those who lost something because of World War One.

The film is low budget however this doesn't really show to be honest and this is a fitting tribute and good story! With regards to the low budget the battle scenes could have been bigger and better but this is by no means a bad film.

The acting and casting is spot on and this film really does show the stupid ill placed passion and faulted logic of young people in this era and, it shows the pressure many had to go through and be forced to fight for freedom not knowing what the loses and costs would be. World War One was a slaughter and waste of millions of lives and the deaths of certain characters and the gruesome way they die shows this war was not the fairy tale adventures many painted it to be at the start.

Among all the blood and slaughter there is a story and the film does well to reflect and show not everyone fighting was a murderer or cold blooded killer and many just wanted it to end.

We need more World War One films like this to teach young people the truths and to keep history alive so we don't make the same mistakes again.

There was great hoopla around "Passchendaele" in 2008, with the hope that it would bring in great audiences when released. However, the box office take in its native Canada was only average, and it faired worse in the international market - the only foreign market it played in theaters was with a (brief) British release, and in the United States the DVD label that picked it up was a small DVD company that specialized in releasing public domain movies.

Seeing the movie, it's easy to see why not that many people were attracted to it. The first half of the movie is pretty awful. I know the intent of this first half was to illustrate war on the home front - which you don't often see in war movies - but it fails in its intentions. The dialogue is downright awful at times, the characters are very familiar, and it's REAL slow going. Even worse is that despite the expense put into the movie, the look and feel of the movie here is like one found with a cheapo drama broadcast on the CBC television network.

The second half of the movie - moving to the Passchendaele battlefields - is a bit more successful than the first half. The battlefield and the battlefield fighting come across as gritty and authentic, and the movie finally has a theatrical feeling to it. However, the movie still suffers from bad dialogue, throwing in ridiculous symbolism as well. Worse of all, the struggle for Passchendaele doesn't last that long - all of a sudden, we're told Passchendaele has been taken. Huh?

Had writer/director/actor Paul Gross had set the movie entirely on the battlefield AND had someone smart working with him to correct the shortcomings of his screenplay, we might have had something here. But as it is, the movie ends up being a big disappointment. What's worse is that this movie's mostly bad reception means that it will probably be a long, long time before some other Canadian tries to make a "big" movie that will attract a large domestic audience - if ever.

Paul Gross' Passchendaele provides a unique perspective of the Canadian effort during the First World War. Those who are expecting just battle scenes will likely be disappointed.

For those looking for character development, some romance, an interesting perspective on recruitment pressure, and yes -- AMAZING battle scenes -- then yes, this movie is for you.

As a Military History student, I had no issues with the historical accuracy of the movie. Paul Gross based the first 5 minutes on his grandfather's story, and the rest is historical fiction. In general, it is an excellent representation of the period, and certainly provides a much more realistic version of the soldiers' perspective on war in 1917 than many other war films out there.

I highly recommend this film.

Wow. Great flick!

Besides being an admitted movie addict, I'm also a retired professional soldier and a combat veteran who's served in multiple theaters of conflict.

I usually find myself quietly disappointed with war movies in general, and their vain, highly stylized, cliché-laden attempts to realistically portray infantry warfare, and high-intensity warfare's effects on soldiers. Film-makers invariably seem to fall far short in their attempts to capture the essence of what war can be (or was) like, and what exposure to it can do to the people involved, both mentally and physically.

To his great credit, I think that in Passchendaele Paul Gross seems to have actually managed to capture a reasonably authentic glimpse into both the nature of such hellish environments and the men caught up in them.

The acting was superb. The performances were so convincing that the notion that I was just sitting watching a movie didn't even occur to me until the credits began to roll by, I was so totally engrossed.

This film was easily one of the best that I've seen in quite some time.

I'll definitely be keeping my eyes open for any future films by Paul Gross. Passchendaele stands as an extremely impressive testimonial to his obvious talents.