josevcutts

This film is terrible because it really builds the feeling that combat is going to happen, then tells you combat is for the weak, even though it never happens - these people never engaged, so how can this be a commentary? All those war films about guys who got into, and either lived or died horribly - on both sides - fighting against stuff they didn't understand, told us all about the futility of war for the soldier on the ground. But this is just the story of some guy using wars as a vehicle to promote himself. To hell with his sentimental feelings about feeling abashed about not being part of it, that doesn't make him worthy of a story.

If you want an anti-war story you show the stupidity and humility of both sides, not the drama-less humdrum of someone who wished for more.

I have no idea - I've never been in a war, but neither were these guys. They got as close as me. Perhaps they were close on a geographic scale, but they only suffered the same hardships I did in military school. I was smart enough to join when there was no war on, and to be truthful, my military school was a lot lot tougher than here with far more drama, but no one needed to make a film out of it because it was still too banal.

Anyone who grew up working class in the early eighties is gonna get right behind Shane Meadows' latest piece, and I found myself whipped back to a time of skineads, unemployment, despondency at our futures, and a general disenfranchised feeling of self worthlessness as experienced by us, the impoverished masses, spearheaded by what was a true tory government - not our current lying tory government, hiding behind a name that used to represent us - but a real tory government that was never afraid to say they hated, yes HATED, us, the working class. You can hate her, but at least she told us that.

With that I loved the idea of This Is England and preminisced a story of wasted and misguided youth, but with an ultimate redemtion in the understanding of why we'd been lied to and told by so many that it was those of colour who would ultimately lead to us being unemployed when we were of age. Or at the very least this could've been a film that reminded us how this modern government, claiming to be representative of the working class, was indeed none other than a Margeret Thatcher Paradigm.

Sadly, although This Is England very much captures a time and place, it provides no lessons or explanations for the reasons why we were lead to think that way, all those years ago in the eighties. There's nothing here but a story, and if you're going to throw in footage of real events, then juxtaposion it against the trials and tribulations of something so real as that time, then at least do it with a point!

It's many years since I blamed the failings of society on race, or sat in on speeches given by Oxbridge educated men who believed in repatriation, and I was hoping to see a little of that growth in This Is England. Unfortunately it isn't there. There's nothing that decries racism - or even the current insanity of liberalism that floods the country with the things we'd been told to fear back then when it wasn't even real! There's no reaffirmations of what we should've learnt from those times. There's nothing to suggest the stupidy of both sides of the political spectrum - the conservatives or conversersly the ultra right wing.

Instead this is just a film about a kid who gets involved in some drama involving skinheads. In defence, the acting and direction is excellent - up there with Ken Loach for realism, and lovable for being so completely English, but a million miles away from Alan Clarke and David Leland for what we can learn - it just isn't what I'd hoped for in way of a bigger picture. Maybe I'm the moron for not being able to see it for what it is: tantamount to a good episode of Eastenders, but sadly, nothing more. If you ever see Shane Meadow's give an interview, he's a really interesting character - you'd definitely expect more than this.