Guerreros

We often watch world conflicts on TV and think they could never occur in our own country: we're too civilized to surrender ourselves to such brutal behaviour. This thought is one of many that haunts a group of Spanish peacekeepers in the embattled Serbian province of Kosovo. The troops represent a spectrum of personalities: the pacifist, the trigger happy, the professional soldier, the UN translator with conflicting loyalties, the soldier who wants no part of somebody else's conflict and who just wants to go home. As they undertake their duties - rebuilding a Church, restoring electricity to a town - the conflict becomes their reality. They are swept into it, and far from being the placid observers & peacekeepers they think they ought to be, they now must fight for their own survival. They slowly begin to lose that veneer of civilization that they though only they possessed, the same patina these embattled locals once had, but lost long ago. The director based many of the stories on actual events as told to him by Spanish soldiers returning from the region. It is filmed in a very gripping and heavy way - drawing you into it all, along with the lost soldiers. It drew great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2002. For those who followed (or survived) the events of the last decade in the Balkans, it is a stark and honest portrayal that will leave many re-thinking the versions they may have formulated in their own minds, reading newspapers and watching TV, comfortable, in their own very civilized, and very insular, homes

I read these reviews and some seem more concerned that the film be educational and politically correct. This film is fiction, and a damn good story about how people react to stress and loss. It could be ANY WAR, and that is the issue. A EXCELLENT movie about people, and not so much a National Geo special.

The characters are real, the story plausible, and at the end of the day it tells a story of conflict and not to heroic survival.

The film is frank and graphic, I am avoiding spoilers, but you should see this movie. It shows a side of us all that we need to see.

One of the thing that this find does is to put you in the place of the characters, you find yourself asking what would I do.

I caught this on Spanish-language HBO the other night and was captured by its style, tension, and brilliantly executed character development. The pacing is deliberate and, at times, frenetic. The tragedy of the "fog of war" in which these Spanish peacekeepers are lost is palatible. If you liked "Saving Private Ryan", "The Big Red One" and "Enemy at the Gates", you'll love "Guerreros".

If you do a movie about a modern conflict like Serbia/Kosovo, you got to have some kind of similarity between the events that really took place and the fiction.

You can't just have a KFOR platoon killed/Raped if nothing like this has ever taken place, which to my knowledge it has not.

If you wanna go down that road then why not Vampires n' Aliens too? It would have been much braver if they had shown the complete feeling of paralysis that the UN leadership had imposed on it's troops which were forced to witness genocide and not allowed to pick up their guns to stop it, exploring the impossibility of staying neutral in armed conflict now that would have been interesting.

Im left with a feeling that many people will be left a little bit dumber after watching this movie.

I think that fortunately spanish cinema is evolving from the obscure era of the "destape" (the first movies that were made after the death of Franco were known like this because most of them were light porn films) and from Almodovar's large shadow.

Guerreros is an entertaining film which makes the audience to question how war is really and how it is showed to us. The film begins with an intense dramatic action scene in which many kosovars are killed by serbian paramilitars. The mission of the platoon is bringing back electrical power to the village and go back home. But finally they get in trouble with the kosovar guerrilla because of the acts of a french captain and almost every french and many spanish die.

They're in the middle of Kosovo without transport, low ammunition and two wounded units.

The history is interesting and it's quite well made from the technical point of view but from the military point of view it's a complete disaster. A disaster because every lieutenant on every army knows how to manage a situation like this; that's why they're lieutenant and not soldiers, platoons never go along the path, and in anyway, all together to give a clear objective to an average shooter.

By the way, some other things are quite well done like the attitude of the sergeant, the way they manage their weapons and how finally they act. That's because they were trained partly by the spanish army and they taught them some things :)

Despite of the military mistakes, it's very entertaining and superb in FX, at least for spanish cinema. As I said in the summary, a hurra for Daniel Carlparsoro.