Iron Cross: The Road to Normandy

Horrid acting. Worse dialog, so many clichés. Zero plot, comically amateurish special effects. Clearly no budget for dialogue coaches, many Germans speak with American accents, or worse, obviously faked German ones.

Looks like WWII reenactment units stumbled onto a movie set. The opening ten minutes is a battle, obviously fought between reenactment groups, everyone desperately trying to keep their precious uniforms clean during the dust up. In fact EVERYONE has pristine uniforms, even the wounded. Apparently no one got dirty during World War II.

Three stars for very accurate equipment.

Avoid this stink burger like the plague. Honestly I didn't make it even half way.

Interesting premise; WWII, promising action on the Eastern front and in Normandy. Could this be 'Cross of Iron' meets 'Saving Private Ryan'?

No it isn't!

This must be the worst war film I've ever watched. So bad it's good? - well nearly, it takes itself too seriously for that.

So poorly acted it looks like a comedic parody, sets and costumes are at AmDram levels e.g. All the soldiers uniforms on the Eastern front are clean and laundered (even the nurse's stockings look fresh out of the packet). Yet, the coastal gun emplacements in France look 80years old when really they would have been built <2yrs earlier.

As some sort of cross between Cross of Iron at the beginning and The Longest Day at the end, it didn't really measure up to either. The acting and the action really didn't come up to much, the CGI explosions were awful and, a bit of anorak on my part, the German MG-42 machine guns were firing at a rate of about 500rpm where in real life they fired at closer to 1,500 which made them sound more like velcro being ripped apart. On the plus side, to give it three stars rather than two, the vehicles were pretty accurate which is quite unusual for a film of this sort and it was great to see a genuine 88mm gun being set up on the cliff. It would be interesting to know where all the gear came from.

Another WW2 film that takes footage from a fairly impressive large scale re-enactment and attempts to edit it into a film. Yes, there are a bunch of these littered around streaming services. This one is pretty much par for the course; you have a sort of boring, poorly acted story crafted around fairly elaborate staged battle scenes.

On one hand a lot of effort was definitely put in by the re-enactors. There are lots of actual WW2 vehicles and equipment on display, which is actually pretty neat. Unfortunately this is supposed to be a film and none of it really 'feels' real. The soldiers often move sort of clumsily, uniforms are pristine clean, and the editing often makes things something of a mishmashes mess. It really is sort of uncanny watching a scene where some elements look convincing and then you have someone fall down in what can be best described as real time slow motion. There is also a combination of fairly impressive re-enactment pyrotechnics combined with some far less convincing after effects style ones. Technically it is really all over the place. Besides the confused editing at times, you can watch a 2 minute scene of this film with color grading that is different in almost every shot. It is all very jarring.

My relative is a re-enactor and I can understand the thought process. We look like WW2 soldiers (basically act as them) and have all this equipment, how hard can making a film be. Sort of ignoring the fact that writing a convincing script let alone convincingly performing it are what actually constitutes a convincing movie. I can respect the effort put into the battle scenes on a sort of technical level. They are at least from a scale/equipment perspective something. Unfortunately some re-enactment footage alone does not a good film make. Really, when you see that the lead actor is also the producer, director, etc. It becomes quite clear. One fairly amateur auteur is spread way too thin on his passion project. Unless you want to watch a bunch of re-enactors live out their own little WW2 German war scenario for almost 2 hours, you can do much better. This would have been MUCH better served as a short film that was tightly edited. Land that before attempting a feature film.

Whatever qualities the move may either have or lack, the listing shows Odessa, Russia, as the filming location. It's Odessa, Ukraine, despite Putin's efforts to make it part of Russia.