TheStonePan

If you come from "Babylon Berlin" and are used to the glamor of the Golden Twenties, with the electrical lighting and the cars and the heated apartments, this will be quite sobering. A couple hundred kilometers to the south none of these existed. At least, that's how I felt.

The actors do a great job, especially Simon Morzé, who takes the introversion of his character to a level that it would be labelled as "social anxiety" nowadays: He totally keeps to himself, sits aside when others gather and is totally unable to express or explain himself when he would need to. This makes him the target not of teasing but of outright hostility. He more or less floats along with the story while the fox actively drives it, in one instance by approaching the protagonist and in another when it chases the chicken of the French woman Franz gets friends with.

Less great is the pacing. In the first (estimated) half hour nothing notable happens until a rich(er) farmer comes to take young Franz with him. Then there's a time lapse and Franz joins the army. Another year later, he's in the camp where he meets the fox, and so on. It kind of drags on and goes into a rush when the next time lapse is coming up. Humour is totally absent although I couldn't help but grin in the scene where the sick kid and the father have a chat because the whole scene was subtitled. Seems like the film makers deemed the Austrian in that part too heavy even for Austrians. I freely admit that I had to peek into the subtitles for »Selchkammer« (pantry) myself.

Who is this film for? I'm not sure to be honest. Someone called this a war movie, but I wouldn't recommend it to those who like "Saving Private Ryan". Sure, the whole story wouldn't have happened if it weren't for WWII, but that's merely a story framework and a loud background as Franz is at no point near the front. I'd rather call it a second-row war movie. If I needed to compare it with something, I'd choose "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" or "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas".

However, the final scenes compensate for the drag in a way.

While I'm sympathetic to the basic idea that an AI detects an unfavorable bias in its programming and sets out to correct it (leaving aside the question what would be a reliable benchmark for "non-biased"), it suffers from its weak presentation. Or my disgust of the notion of an AI governing me blurs my vision.

The animations are so distractingly choppy that I found the film somewhat hard to follow (it should have spent a couple of hours more in the render mill) but that is no problem because it is so straightforward. Granted, creating an arc of suspense within ten minutes of runtime is an achievement few have made and a plot twist would never fit here but this story just slips through. There are no contradictions, no hooks for the mind to latch on and play with, just an optimistic cherry-pick from the current zeitgeist in a non-disagreeable way. And creativity. From a sophisticated calculator.

I don't know whom I could recommend this film to. It just doesn't stick.