The Great War

Just skip the positive reviews, reading those for this movie is just a waste of time, actually just like watching this movie, just don't bother as there are tons of better war movies. The acting isn't good at all, below average, mediocre at best. The two names Ron Perlman and Billy Zane are just poster fillers, they have minor roles. But besides the acting it's the story that is really poorly executed, maybe it could have been something with a good director and better actors, but in this case it's pretty lame. The fighting scenes are just ridiculous, it just feels like somebody was filming a bad reenactment of a battle in the woods, or filming his friends playing paintball or so. If any of those characters would have served in the war they would be dead after one second. Just skip this movie, trust me it's not worth your time.

I understand the importance of highlighting forgotten issues. And the effort made into doing so.

But honestly. This movie is really really bad.

So bad that it became funny.

A spectacled German sniper, just standing there, beside a tree. It made me spit out my coffee (okay okay, it was beer). German soldiers falling like flies with a few gunshots. Enemies meeting each other on a straight (!) path just staring at each other, then starting to shoot and charge. Blood that looks a lot like the ketchup I had earlier on my food.

Bates Wilder did a pretty good job though. Perlman and Zane... no idea what they were doing there.

Again, all respect for the historical references and the sacrifices that have been made at the time in the Great War.

But I'm looking at not just the message, but also at the movie.

And quite frankly, this movie sucks.

Very poor. Combine pure cheese with laughable acting and amateur action scenes. Painful to watch.

While this story is an important one that needs to be told, it's just a bad movie all around. The dialogue is hackneyed and trite. The uniforms look too clean and intact, the sets look like they're for a high school play, the acting is weak and wooden, and the whole thing reeks of an amateur production.

This is like a film that someone with a few thousand dollars made with his friends in a local park. Plus, the blatant ripoffs of Saving Private Ryan are obvious.

I really tried to keep watching and wanted to like it, but it was just so bad.

The Writer is the Director - if the two roles had been separate then one would have picked up on the many historical inaccuracies, particularly in the dialogue, where many of the phrases spoken are things that have been common language in the last decade, not 100 years ago. Other aspects, such as the over-familiarity between the ranks were simply not the way it was...