Company K

I almost wrote this review before I saw the movie . . Something along the lines of " Oh dear trust Uncle Sam to make a film on how they turned up to save the Limeys in World War One etc etc " What I should have done is remember the old phrase " Never assume anything because it makes an ass out of you and me " . That said it does suffer from the low budget independent film look and feel and watching the early scenes you'd be totally forgiven for thinking this was a dreary TVM . It's painfully obvious the budget didn't stretch to filming somewhere , anywhere that might resemble the Western Front in 1917-18 where a few short years of war had turned the landscape in to something resembling a muddy version of the surface of the Moon . This has led to some people on this page to dismiss COMPANY K out of hand . If you're expecting epic battle scenes then this isn't the film for you but does manage to make anti-war statements better than a lot of films with ten times the budget

I've never read the book and some people might suggest that the film suffers from sticking too rigidly to the book with its episodic nature and its character-centric vignettes but I disagree . All too often in war films the characters are hidden behind uniforms and helmets and it's difficult to keep track of who is who hence we get movies like THE LONGEST DAY and THE THIN RED LINE where a host of household names appear in cameos simply to remind the audience who the character is . The storytelling technique of COMPANY K negates the need for a big name cast and the obvious use of exposition pointing out who the character is , we're introduced to the m instantly via on screen caption and his works very well . It might not be subtle but this isn't a subtle film and deals with the usual war is hell , something it never hints at in the opening . Let me just repeat that the opening scenes give the impression you're going to be watching an anti-septic PG certificate made for television production which isn't what happens . It's not explicit war porn either but concentrates of the psychological horrors of war and was actually quite shocked at some of the on screen happenings carried out by the US Marine Corps . In war movies Americans are always the good guys and behave exemplary no matter the provocations no matter what and they're always real men untouched by any horror but not in this movie . Finally a word on the musical score by Craig McConnell and Donald Stark which can be criticised as being on one hand intrusive and manipulative but is very effective and atmospheric

OK i have to get this off my chest first of all to the people saying its the greatest war movie ever made. the movie itself i felt was poorly made. mostly because of the bad acting. the acting is pretty bad even for a Indi film. but besides the acting being bad it really isn't that bad of a movie. there's lots of action, the story is easy to follow, and the characters are even likable which is surprising by their acting. another plus is that it is a World War 1 movie. you hardly ever get to see or even hear about World War 1. this movie definitely got what war can do to a person mentally. this movie also is good for accuracy. overall if you can overlook the bad acting this is still a really good movie.

I write this review on Memorial Day 2008 and there's lots of talk on television and elsewhere about the sacrifice of soldiers in Iraq. In my opinion, those young women and men are giving their lives and their mental stability to an unnecessary cause created to satisfy the ego of a madman. But what about the soldiers in the Great War, the War to End All Wars - World War I? Those soldiers are the subject of Company K.

William March was the penname for William Edward Campbell who, in 1933, published Company K which was hailed as a masterpiece by critics and writers alike and has been referred to as the American view of the hopelessness and brutality - just as effective and shattering as Erich Maria Remarque's classic anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. March was a popular novelist and story writer of the 30's, 40's, and 50's. Today, his most well-know novel is The Bad Seed.

March was a reclusive man who was hard to get to know. He suffered a number of nervous breakdowns - as they were called in his day - that were surely post traumatic stress episodes due to his experiences as a Marine in WWI. He died from a series of heart attacks in 1954 at the height of his writing career.

The soldiers in Company K are not the great generals and leaders whose names have gone down in history but are the grunts who actually did the fighting and dying. They are not great heroes but just young men who are trying to survive the madness into which they have been injected. They are not idealized or romanticized. Some do bad things. Some are so scared they run. Some carry out insane orders. Some carry out inhumane orders. Most of those who survive go home to lead normal lives, but there are some who are never able to remove from their minds the horrors of deeds seen or deeds done.

The film, Company K is not a great production. It's episodic but in a very choppy way. Is that the fault of the director or the editor? Who knows? But within each episode, the viewer is offered a realistic view of these young men caught in circumstances beyond their control. There is no glory - only guts.

There are no well-known actors in this film. All are just good actors who do a good job at showing us all of the aspects of these men thrown together into the snake pit of battle.

There are uncountable films about women and men in war. Some are extraordinary while some are really bad. Company K falls somewhere in the middle and it is surely worth a viewing in order to get to know some very human men.

Before he found his writer's voice, writer William March spent the better part of fifteen years thinking about the horrors he experienced as an infantryman in World War One. The book was titled "Company K," and has become a war classic alongside "Johnny Got His Gun" and "All Quiet on the Western Front."

Seventy years following the book's publication, filmmaker Robert Clem has converted March's story into an accessible and engaging documentary.

"Company K" is Clem's latest, and in my opinion, best work. The film provides a stark and compelling look at the First World War in which 100,000 American men died, although the memory of that war has virtually vanished. (I know Robert Clem and his work from the documentary he made partly of the life of my grandfather, in another WWI film "War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator.")

Using a score of vignettes that roughly follow March's written format, the film portrays war's farce and horror. Here is a young soldier joining his cohorts in a French bar. One of the hostesses seduces the man by telling how her husband recently died on the Front. It might have turned into a love story, except for the fact that as soon as they return to the bar, she moves on to the next soldier. Our naive protagonist is initially dumbstruck, and then becomes enraged, attacking his company mates.

A nice allegory of how war operates on the push-pull emotions of lust and betrayal.

Another off-battle scene could easily have occurred in peacetime. The company's commanding office bullies his men relentlessly, tearing up their shore passes one by one as he throws their washed clothes into the mud. "Wash them again," he commands. The men are crestfallen. These opening scenes quickly move to grittier stuff. If it's gore you're looking for, you won't be disappointed. The violence is low key--and devastating. One scene shows two soldiers coming across a dead German. The men are hungry, and discover a loaf of bread on the dead man. The scene might not work in color, as the realism could prove a distraction. When the men discover the bread to be soaked in the soldier's blood, they hesitate. One after the other they dig in, swallowing every bite.

Another scene develops more slowly. Americans are ordered to shoot German prisoners. At first the men resist, but then comes the clincher.

"These prisoners are not really surrendering," the sergeant tells them. "It's an old trick. The sergeant's words prove effective. His men's astonished sense of betrayal pushes them into slaughtering their counterparts. The scene proves to be a harrowing preview of the Nazi techniques used twenty years later.

Company K is particularly instructive in today's political turmoil. You won't hear any arguments among academics or war hawks that the Great War lived up to its name, or succeeded in making the world Safe for Democracy. In Robert Clem's "Company K," we experience what poet Robert Lowell called war's "blundering butcher" as it tromped across Europe and left scars that remain with us today.

For this movie, my recommendation is to read the book. I have not, and do not discount the power which may have been conveyed by the original author who lived the experiences.

But all credibility which this movie may have had, washed away for me because there was no dirt, no mud, no decay, no rats, no lice, no corpse stink, no depiction of the truly terrible conditions in which these people fought and slogged and died.

All of the soldiers' kit was unblemished, unstained, unmuddied, looking like the producer did not want to risk the expense of getting it cleaned upon its return to the props department. The trenches looked like they had been built that afternoon.

You want to tell an effective story with pictures, you have to make the pictures right, or the story doesn't get told.

Go watch "All Quiet On The Western Front" for the quintessential depiction of World War I.