The Patrol

If you want to watch a war film with action in it, this isn't for you.

Storyline was quite boring, and a lack of actual military knowledge made this film worse

This film is too political for me, i want to see gunfights, attack strategies, ambushes, exiting parts of army life, not people walking, and moaning

Its hard to describe a film that doesn't have much going on in it

Despite what the cover says, the hurt locker is a lot different to this film

In my opinion, this film just makes the British army look rubbish

Wouldn't recommend this film to anyone

As someone who is fed up with watching countless American films about their involvement in their wars, I was fairly excited to watch this British take on the Afghanistan conflict. Unlike the American versions however, this film had an incredibly small budget. Having said that, the kit is good, the sound effects and the explosions etc are incredibly good. It's not perfect however, the storyline could be better and at times some voices seem dull. But all in all, with such a tight budget, this is an excellent film, I hope that this production team will get together once more and produce another film with a slightly bigger budget.

As I just said on Allo Ciné French website a few minutes ago, when you choose to watch a war movie, you also have to choose between realism and spectacular pop corn entertainment. Both don't fit together. Because realism - reality connection - may be more boring, more atrocious and more crazy and unbelievable than the usual large audiences movies schemes, with the good guys vs the bad guys, the love story and the "they remained happy ever after " crap. Here in this film, you have nothing of this. The soldiers who fight in Afghanistan are not TRANSFORMERS or RAMBO characters every day. Please, watch this film as a documentary like movie, so close to reality that it will deceive many silly viewers who expected a Michael Bay like flick with one hundred million dollars budget. The main problem with film critics, is that the people confound objectivity with subjectivity. Because if a movie doesn't square with the idea they had of this feature before seeing it, if that doesn't fit, they will say the film is a crap. And this jeopardizes the idea that the film may have on large potential audiences who read those prick critics as if it was the Bible. So, yes, that's a very good movie, so far it's the first picture from the director, an ex soldier himself, with a tiny budget and unknown actors.

Tom Petch's gripping and intelligent 2013 British war action drama film The Patrol is set in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006, and looks at the Afghan conflict through the eyes of dazed and scared British soldiers.

It is highly recommended, though right now it has an unfairly low vote on the IMDb.

It won the jury prize for Film of the Festival - Feature at the Raindance Film Festival 2013.

The cast are Owain Arthur as Taff, Nicholas Beveney as Sergeant 'Sol' Campbell, Daniel Fraser as Lieutenant Jonathan Bradshaw, Alex McNally as Ginge, Oliver Mott as Stab, Ben Righton as Captain William Richardson, and Nav Sidhu as Smudge.

I suppose if your experience is limited to veteran level on Call of Duty or Michael Bay films then this probably isn't your cup of tea.

I saw this film in Brighton recently, and was very impressed given the limited budget. Combat is 98% boredom and 2% sheer terror, and this film didn't try to make out that war is anything other than that, along with soldiers bitching about their kit and conditions, and the inevitable stress and tension between fighting men, particularly when the enemy is elusive and rarely clearly seen.

Judging by other reviews, one might be forgiven for thinking that war is an entertainment franchise. Nice to see a war film directed by a former soldier with a grounding in the realities of combat, rather than some fist-pumping gung-ho CGI-fest directed by a Hollywood celebrity with a massive budget and zero experience of the realities of war.

Something of an antidote to the usual war film cheerleading, and not one to appeal to MMRPG playing geeks.