Tajemnica Westerplatte

This is a pseudo-psychological reinterpretation of the defense of Westerplatte. It is full of hysterics, pregnant pauses, unsubstantiated in documents conflicts and dramas. The unit defending the outpost was in reality hand-picked, and the commanders were seasoned and battle hardened. Instead the movie is trying to portray them all as screaming, hysterical old women, running back and forth. This is an awful movie with some decent albeit low budget special effects.

Perhaps the movie was trying to be trendy and "questioning", but questions it is trying to ask are unsupported by evidence, and the answers are confused and consisting primarily of emotional outbursts.

Add to this subpar play by the actors who occasionally seem surprised by the script, and you have a recipe for a D movie. Skip.

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 don't blame foreigners if they can't see the controversy behind this movie but to read a Pole's review with such little understanding ...shocking. The original title of this film in Polish reads "The secret of Westerplatte". And that is what matters here. Westerplatte became a legend of Polish resistance,national symbol of heroism and sacrifice. Generations were brought up with this myth of Poland's Thermopylae. Historical truth though was much prosaic and this movie is more like a documentary which tries to give the honest account of events and raise some important questions about the sens of sending people to unnecessary death and suffering. For God's sake - this is what this film is about. And yes, soldiers of Westeplatte and in all other places like it, were dying in horror, behaving often in completely nonsensical, cowardly way, losing they cool, senses, dignity. This is a true picture of war. Poland lost 6 million people in it, mostly due to so much resistance we put up. Was it worth anything? That is what this film is about. Don't expect a B class war movie. It ain't.

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.

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.