LASD_Dad

I have very little tolerance for lazy filmmaking and lazy filmmakers. This movie had more producers than common sense. And NOT ONE TECHNICAL ADVISOR. The props people and the armorer are all amateurs. (Didn't anyone learn a SINGLE THING from "Rust"?)

Cliche. One can always escape a barred cell and chains by faking convulsions. Always.

One can fire a military rifle and a pistol inside a ship without any ear or eye protection, and they are JUST FINE. No ricochets. No deafening noise causing permanent and irreversible hearing damage. No nothing.

Thankfully, (see above) all the gunshots were CGI. They were the WORST CGI I have seen in 30 years though! (If you can believe it, they were even worse than the CGI gunshots with Jude Law in "Existenz.")

Maybe the presence of a Technical Advisor or an armorer NOT on their first film could have told them ... you do NOT keep your weapon lights on while searching. It gives away your position and ruins your night vision. Plus, running around a ship with a million protruding and turning parts, pieces and machinery with your dog tags hanging OUTSIDE YOUR SHIRT is really really stupid.

Sorry, but this movie got too stupid too fast. They should have had fewer producers on their first film huddled around the monitors and boasting about their "net points" deals, and instead maybe hired some competent technical staff.

Nicholas Cage, you should be ashamed of yourself. You make a movie with low budget offshore crew on their very first rodeo and you get low budget results.

I stumbled across this film one night, and I honestly couldn't take my eyes off it long enough to even grab a beer. I may be from California, but I am not ra-ra "American war movies are the BEST." This movie was stunning, and possibly one of the best low-budget war movies I have ever seen.

It was so real, and it is an example of how good filmmakers can still get everything in the camera and make movies look real instead of actors acting to a stick with orange tape on it or standing in front of a green screen for three months.

As a former Ranger, I can attest that the weapons, vehicles and helicopters were all real. (And, by the way, to reviewers who thought they were American-made, they were actually ALL made in Turkey, under licence from the original designers.) I especially loved how they used blanks for many of the scenes, and how their equipment was not just correct for the period and the country, but were also in the correct place. (VERY rare, even today.) They even had custom-made dummy cartridges for this movie, just to show the detail. (You can recognize them by the plain head of the cartridges in the close-ups, with no fake primers.)

In fact, the only thing I could fault was the translation from Turkish that described the enemy pickup trucks as "tactical" vehicles, when the correct term is "technical" vehicle. (Plus, maybe a scene with an Abrams but I don't want to give anything away.)

Outstanding movie, and everyone from the cast, crew, producers, director, writers, technical advisors and military trainers should be proud.

I don't need to repeat the comments from other one-star (fair) reviews of this piece of junk designed to get quick bucks on opening weekend from moviegoers before word-of-mouth sunk this faster than the USS Indianapolis. Just to illustrate how little the producers, writer and director cared about this movie, they sank a vintage PBY Catalina during filming, and then hired a salvage company that would make the three stooges look like atomic scientists to recover it from the beach where it sank in shallow water.

Three stooges salvage company broke the rare airplane apart while trying to winch it onto a barge. It was destroyed forever.

Obviously, the salvage company had zero clue about the lift points and structural members of the aircraft ... which is about the same as the zero clue that producers had about the historical accuracy of this movie.

Just to illustrate my point, while the vintage PBY Catalina was sitting nose-down in the surf, producers made the decision to knock off a couple of quick scenes on board it while the airplane was sitting there being destroyed in the ocean. (See if you can spot that scene where they filmed footage in the bow of a partially-sunken Catalina.)

This disrespect towards an irreplaceable and invaluable piece of history is matched only by the disrespect they paid to the actual crew of the USS Indianapolis.