Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers

*Lousy acting (lots of unnecessary emoting) *Awful sound (muddled in parts, unnaturally sparse in others) *Questionable historical sets/settings (is that even France?) *No directing (everything is in close up!) *Laughable dialog ("Why, you're as ugly as soup!!") *Even the soundtrack is the wrong era (retro big band music??!).

This is just a bad community college play captured on film.

If this movie cost $50, someone spent $40 of it on hookers for the crew.

I understand that this is an Indy film and all, but come on, they made decent war movies in the 50s and 60s with small budgets on the back lot. Why can't these folks (in 2011) come up with at least a watchable film about such an important story?

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.

I like a good war film and this is not a good war film. Awful close ups all the time. They should be used for dramatic effect not in every scene or cutaway. Terrible sound as if recorded in a toilet. This was shot on 35mm? What a waste. Civilian period costumes awful. The English country house? Obviously set in in USA. We did not have double glazed front doors, Lelandi firs, and a totally terrible period interior. Dialogue lacked lustre and to be quite honest I didn't care what they said after an hour of meaningless trite dialogue.Acting from the school of bad acting.Fast pace? What movie were you watching? Lighting done with a forty watt bulb and at other times with a exterior floodlight from the Home Depot. The locations were a joke. Have you ever been to Normandy or even researched the locations? They don't have a re-occurring picket fence and country paths but high hedgerows and flat plains. It looked as if it was all filmed on someones country estate. As for the largest exterior set used in a low budget film, I would ask for a refund. Didn't you you do any research yet again. I note the DOP is not mentioned in the enormous credit list. I take it he was too ashamed to put his name to it. Everything was seriously flawed in one way or another and I could go on and on but I have wasted enough time on this already. Why did I give it a 2? The aeroplanes, you could have made more of them.

I have never posted before, never seen the point as some one else tends to have said what I think already but after watching this film I felt compelled to say something.

The only positive comments seem to stem from the amount of time spent on the film and/or the small amount of money it cost so let me tackle this first.

Time spent on the film: If the film took this long then why did it look like it had been improvised the day before? The script was shocking. Why were the camera angles so bizarre and laboured? Where is the evidence of this?

Size of budget: I have not been able to find anything saying how big the budget was so cannot provide a definitive comparison. That said there are numerous examples of people taking small budgets and working them into something that the actors can say they have been in with pride. A small budget does not equal a poor film any more large budgets guarantee a good film. Money should not have made as much of an impact unless it meant that they obtained the services of a director, script writer, camera man etc really cheap because they were in a coma. I could have forgiven you a few small inaccuracies with kit due to a small budget but the deficiencies with the film far exceed anything to do with money.

I have seen excellent performances within theatre performed entirely by amateur dramatists that are on par with professional pieces. You have to take account the woeful script but big questions need to be asked of the person in charge of casting & the director. I'm not going to attack the actors here (though the performances were poor) because even the best performances possible would have been lost within the putrid mire of the rest of the production.

As said previously I would never tell someone not to watch a film but I would strongly recommend thinking again before watching this. Even 'Teeth' (normally my lowest marker) was better than this.

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.