La Bataille de Westerplatte

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.

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 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.

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 read reviews and was somewhat apprehensive but I liked the movie. It shows different attitudes of men in extreme situations. I could be deemed corny but the life often is. And do not expect constant fire and gore.