Tajemnica Westerplatte

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.

"If we go to war no one will back us up." September 1st, 1939, the Polish city of Gdansk is an important port city that the German's are looking to take control of. Trying not to scare the entire country the army decides to send a small group of 600 soldiers against the Germans with only one goal, hold out for at least 12 hours. When it becomes clear that no support is coming for them and with dwindling supplies and medical aid they have to decide to fight till the last man falls or surrender. This is a true story of the first battle of WWII. This is not a terrible war movie at all and is worth seeing but it is pretty slow moving and the war scenes leave something to be desired. The movie is interesting though and really makes you understand what the Polls went through in the beginning of Hitler's advance but it is just a little too slow in some parts to stay fully focused on. Overall, a true war movie that is worth watching but don't expect wall to wall excitement. I give it a B-.

Imagine the King Leonidas meme screaming in your face:

WAR!

IS!

NUANCED!!@!!!!

Followed by subtlety & believability getting kicked screaming into a bottomless pit in glorious slow-mo.

This film is supposedly tackling a sacred cow of Polish war history (and national mythology), namely the heroic defense of Westerplatte against all odds. In doing so, it asks us to scratch beneath the surface of the heroic warrior narrative and see the reality of that event, in all its complexity and nuance and human frailty, warts and all. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to appreciate this nuance when the film spends two hours beating our skulls with a sledgehammer and screaming in our faces about how complex and subtle the real situation was.

The characters seem to have two emotional settings: zero and ten; catatonic and hysterical, stoic and screaming. This is not subtlety or nuance. It's binary, and it rings false. The performances are soap opera melodramatic, with lots of Drama School overacting. The old 1967 version is so much better in every respect.

How can the Number 1 & 2 ranking officers spend several days issuing contradictory orders and directly undermining each other without the entire thing falling to pieces? That's absurd. Either the commanding officer would lock up the second-in-command for direct insubordination (and perhaps treason) and get on with business, or that guy would go through whatever military procedure is available to relieve his commander of duty, and then take corrective steps to right the sinking ship. You can't spend several days in the middle of combat with the top dog issuing orders and his underling simply saying "no" again and again. This is absurd.

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.

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.