Pathfinders: Vers la victoire

I'm probably in the minority here but I found this film to be a steaming pile of "could have". It could have been better, it could have used a bigger budget, it could have used a better director and better actors. And most of all it could have used a better cinematographer.

From the very start of the film it's pretty obvious that this is an extremely low budget effort for the extremely ambitious story they are trying to tell. And unfortunately this just is NOT done well. I've seen lo-budget war pictures before that ended up being extremely effective. In the main they used a fairly limited number of sets and actors and tried to tell "smaller" stories. Pathfinders is an attempt to tell a very large story on a shoestring.

The opening of the movie has a woman singing a song that sounds nothing like a period piece. The wardrobe is just barely up from Halloween costume quality. And the acting is stiff and phony. And it doesn't get any better. Hiring a bunch of amateur hour actors so that you can spend most of your limited budget trying (unsuccessfully) to make your film look authentic is a bad bad idea.

Another irritating thing is the very initial premise of the movie. The use of Pathfinders before the D-Day invasion has been a secret for 60 years. HUH??? Secret from who for crying out loud? Anyone with even a passing interest in WW2 history knows that. It may well be true that nobody made a movie about just that exact facet of D-Day before but it sure as hell hasn't been a secret for 60 years. Pathfinders are at least mentioned in several films, including The Longest Day.

Despite all of the shortcomings of the film, my biggest gripe is with the camera work. Why the heck are there so many needless closeups? Are they trying to hide the shoddy quality of the sets and wardrobe? Honestly this is not the worst film I've ever seen. If it was just a low budget effort with some shortcomings I'd probably give it a 5 or 6 out of 10 rating. BUT it's a movie that never should have been made for this kind of budget! There are some things you just cannot pull off successfully without money. And the people behind this film would have done a lot better if they had tried to work within budget limitations. Ignoring the small budget and trying to do it anyway is just a case of stupidity and arrogance.

3 out of 10.

Three companies of paratroopers travel in a deadly mission to France to prepare the drop zone for the airborne attack on the D-Day. They have to install an Eureka transmitter and searchlight to guide the planes in the Normandy invasion.

"Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers" is a dreadful and lame war movie - maybe the worst I have ever seen. The "untold and lost story" is disrespectful with the true Normandy invasion and the screenplay is awful without character development and poor dialogs. The direction is also awful with permanent close up camera and terrible soundtrack of machine gun all the time. The acting is ridiculously amateurish. The "battle scenes" are so fake and there is one particularly corny scene, when the German soldier throws a grenade in the trench, one paratrooper shows it to the others and uses his body to contain the explosion instead of throwing it back. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Desbravadores: Na Companhia de Estranhos" ("Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers")

Note: On 20 March 2021, I saw this film again.

The master plan for the invasion of Nazi-occupied France calls for a small group of pathfinders to set up radio beacons in order to guide the airborne assault. For reasons unknown, the Allied command decides that this mission is to be entrusted to a sorry bunch of third-rate soldiers gathered haphazardly from various units, hence the title "in the company of strangers". Fortunately, the German opposition is made up of utterly incompetent reservists with no combat experience whatsoever.

This movie might have been better as a comedy. A major and a captain discuss the details of the upcoming invasion in a pub! A member of the super-secret pathfinder force visits his girlfriend the day before D-Day! Paratrooper tells funny story involving explosive vomiting!

Not to mention -- weird colors, giving a subtle air of authenticity (or that's what the cinematographer thought, anyway) -- flat dialog -- flat delivery -- and flat combat scenes. Plus, for the true connoisseur, we show an English house in the 1940s with thermopane windows! and an American post-and-rail fence in Normandy!

Don't bother.

I suspect due to a slight nostalgia mixed with patriotism - we find the vast glut of WW2 dramas and films receiving high ratings on places like IMDb. Some deserve it - like Band of Brothers, other don't.

This films diminished budget seems to have been an excuse to get bad actors who can't deliver lines (but have been told to leave 'poignant'.... gaps.... for dramatic effect). In addition the camera work is bizarre - weird close-ups at strange moments, bad editing and sound that needs normalising to avoid you constantly having to locate the volume control.

Apart from that there's the odd bit of decent dialogue - but not much. The enemy Germans are portrayed in the usual manner all lazy war films do... nothing to challenge the distortions of history here. Oh - and I'm sure I saw a British house looking very up-to-date with PVC window frames - maybe they were back-engineering from alien window tech in the 1940s??

I wanted to like this movie, but I'm afraid I just couldn't - sorry. Here are my main faults.

1) Film-makers -here's a tip - the CLOSE-UP can be an effective tool in story telling, BUT if you ONLY use close ups and never any other angles, it just ends up feeling like you are trapped in a cardboard box with the actors.

2) The lighting - TOO DARK. I had to adjust the settings on my TV to make out the action and in the end I just couldn't tell who the different characters were. Which brings me to....

3) Characters - except for 3 or 4 guys I just didn't know who was who. There was not enough time spent developing any personalities before we head off to France and.....

4) France - and particularly Normandy. Had anyone involved in the film ever been to Normandy? The roads, fields and countryside used for filming look NOTHING like Normandy and what was with that brand new American style wooden fence. There is NOTHING like that in Normandy.

5) Acting - Now I know that I shouldn't expect Matt Damon and other A-listers in every film. But where did they find this lot? Bar a couple of exceptions they were all awful. Surely there are college actors out there who don't sound like they are reading everything off idiot boards? As I say, I wanted to like this film, I know some of the guys who were filmed jumping and others involved in the original concept. But, this truly is a piece of garbage. Well intended perhaps - but a piece of garbage nonetheless.

Sorry