Churchill

On the basis that other reviewers have very adequately covered the glaring objections to this film I will keep this brief.

In an action packed life of 80 years involving 2 world wars and one other significant war (The Boer War), a momentous political career, a life filled with both failure as well phenomenal achievements, that the filmmakers should think it necessary to MAKE UP a story about Churchill seems like the pinnacle of perversity. It just defies any logic hitherto known to mankind.

"Poetic license" is nothing new in movie making. However this movie is more like a "license to kill", kill a man's reputation, kill the concept of history, and kill the truth. The preservation of actual history in the light of revisionism is difficult enough without the general public being exposed to downright lies to further confuse and deceive them.

I give this movie a 1 as a protest, in the probably forlorn hope that if enough people do the same to all movies that mess around with history, movie makers will get the message and steer their movies in a way that treats people and history responsibly.

This film may make a good story but it doesn't make good history.It is true to say that the casualties on the first day in Normandy equalled those on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.However it is difficult to give much credence to the notion of the film.Churchill would have been aware of the threat posed by the V rockets and the prospect that if nothing were done eventually the whole of Europe would have been overrun by Stalin's Soviet army.Also by this time Churchill had very little say in things and he was aware of this.He was not senile,which the film implies,but he was haunted by depression,which the film chooses not to mention.All told this is a film which is totally unworthy of the great man's memory.

It's hard to understand the motivation of the makers of this movie in producing such an appalling and deliberate distortion of the facts. It is nothing but a hit piece intended to defame a great man. Don't waste one minute of your life on it.

Churchill is depicted as a diminished, drooling buffoon and many who remember him as one of the great names and leaders during WWII will find this movie intolerable. At the end of the film after the credits you see some weaselly disclaimer about how the movie, although based on real people, may or may not have presented events as they really happened.

And so this movie marches on with its hit-piece agenda and the writer should be ashamed to marginalize such a noted figure with such a self-indulgent point of view. Did the writer teleport back in time and hover like Patrick Swayze in a room? Scene after scene shows Churchill as an anxious, alcoholic insecure man with no counterpoints to show him in a leadership role. I'm all for a certain angle for movies and political news shows, but this went too far and came off as an over-reach and simply an ego trip for a script.

Historical accuracy aside, the movie fails in other ways. Besides the cringe-worthy buffoon angle, the music was simply overbearing and not needed in half the scenes. I wish I had brought some noise-canceling headphones to the movie theater. Scene after scene I was praying for just the dialogue to speak for itself without the watery musical underbed to drive it. Scene after scene I was praying for silence. It's as if the music was in love with itself. Well some of us weren't.

John Slattery, who was excellent in Mad Men, was a total miscast. Slattery simply did not have the gravitas to carry the role of Eisenhower.

The movie's only saving grace was Brian Cox, answering the misguided casting call for a needy, spiraling performance of Churchill. He runs away with the role, although an unfair role at that. How much more serving and evergreen it would have been if the character given to him was not so one-sided. But Cox delivers and many of the actors in his scenes simply wither. This would be the time for a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Cox, so blistering was his distressed portrayal of Churchill. Two other actors to hold their own in the movie was Miranda Richardson, who played her role with stoic and steely grace, and the actor who played Smuts, an understated yet praiseworthy performance.

All in all if you care about history, and understand that leaders have both greatness and weakness in decision-making, this movie did not flesh out those layers. Instead it comes off slamming the persona of a historic figure.

Yet another film where they feel the audience is too stupid to have any knowledge of the subject, so must dumb it all down into patronising pap.

Not happy with insulting us already, they then take historical facts and rewrite them totally for no other reason than they can. Then slip in the old adage "Based On A True Story" which like so many films, claiming to be 'Based on a true story' is actually code for a load of B.S. pretending to be factual.

Churchill was one of the greatest, complex and most flawed characters of recent history.

Instead of going with truth (and therefore being much much more interesting) they went for a Hollywood horrible caricature full of errors and downright lies.

I'm not surprised the writer has no other credits shown on IMDb. This is atrocious pap. Insulting to a great man, who we were privileged for him to give 'the lions roar' for us, in the face of evil.

People watch films like this and others e.g. 'The Imitation Game' and think they are portraying factual history. They leave the theatre feeling they have learned something, instead it varies from gross distortion of the truth to out and out lie.

The irony is, the true story is so much more interesting. But it means the writers would have to put a lot of work in portraying it. Hence it's more convenient to serve us this pap and pass it off as 'historical'.

the reviews saying this is an 'Insight into Churchill' etc, shows real ignorance and how Hollywood rewrites history.