Apocalipse: Redescobrindo a Segunda Guerra Mundial

This is a world war 2 documentary like no other. It contains a brilliant musical overture, often haunting but superbly executed. The narration is good, but the biggest plays is the colour footage which brings the war alive like no other documentary.

Inevitably, comparisons will be drawn with the masterpiece "The World at War". These are unfair comparisons. This documentary had its own angle and story and special way of telling it.

I watched this series when it came out over a decade ago and I just had an urge to watch it again. It certainly feels more chilling now than when I was a teenager and the brilliant colors of the Second World War will forever be seared on my mind.

The high resolution film scans look great. They are the main attraction here so be sure to watch it in HD. The colorizing is good too, making the footage more powerful for today's audience, although I can imagine that future improvements will eventually make it look dated.

The script repeats an old error about the Polish cavalry units in Ep. 1. A brief clip of men charging with sabers drawn is narrated "The Polish cavalry charges the German tanks, and is slaughtered." This is nonsense and insulting. World War I taught every cavalry officer that cavalry charges were a thing of the past. Polish cavalry c.1939 were not classic cavalry. The were highly mobile infantry units which used horses to move but then fought dismounted. They were highly effective in that role.

"Perfection is rare to find" is the favourite phrase of an aesthetic surgeon. This is just it.

The text is superb. Informative, NEUTRAL, without concessions for any party, and with a subtler enough message of hope. The images are really unbelievable. Also unusual. If you think you've seen them all and docus on wars bore you, think again. Kassovitz's voice is just what's needed for the job: enthusiastic and yet dry enough so you get "just the facts". If you ever look for a good music equipments, when you read reviews you'll find that one of the best compliments writers do is: "doesn't get in between you and the music". You don't "notice" the direction, editor, the "author" who made this monumental work. Even with touchy topics like the Holocaust, they just deliver the facts. Their involvement is obvious, but they always give us the facts first. Whether you are cramming for a general education examination or if you want to be a bit less ignorant on probably the most relevant topic of the XX century, you'll find no better documentary. Engaging, painful to watch at times, showing us the consequences on the peasants and the "little people" as well as the general's feats and whims, this saga strikes the right balance at everything. From the Blitzkreig to the V2, from Normandie to the unlikely allies the Nazis got from the dominated Slav countries (and how they mistreated them for "not being Aryan", everything is here, and more. Even Hitler's madness. Just one example: him calling Churchill and Roosevelt "jewizizing" after another military setback. Surely history is staggering enough: the Islamists were one of the unlikely willful allies of the Nazis, "combating the common Zionist enemy".

Words are not enough to describe the "thirst for nothingness" Hitler saw on the world, Japanese's pride, American altruism, British flame, the French way of failing so much, for so long, Italian's mistrust of government, Soviet power and blindness, German efficiency in devising the cruelest weapon (i.e. the mines with a "click") as the Berliner. performing yet another perfect rehearsal. If there's just one thing I'd have liked is less bias for the tiniest "heroic French action" completely irrelevant for the course of the war, and absent from any history manuals. Time being a scarce resource, it'd been useful to cover a bit more of the Pacific front, barely mentioned. It's also a bit Eurocentric in scope, but I suppose that's the price to pay. Nobody is perfect after all :(.

Whatever is to be learned from wars must be here. Whatever can be learned is never enough, never too late, never enough. Churchill's famous prose give this documentary two of the most memorable moments, in which it was difficult for me not to cry. People may not learn, again. Yes, a documentary on such hay-necked topic can still do that to you.

Maybe the story is not 100% complete, and maybe it gets a little confusing because so many things happen simultaneously throughout the world, so it's understandable that they didn't cover every single aspect and that it's a little too much "French biased", after all it is a French documentary. For example they didn't cover the Balkans at all, and there was one of the most complicated situations in the whole WW2. Maybe not the most important, but certainly interesting, especially in Yugoslavia, where there was in effect a three-way civil war under Nazi occupation, between royalists, communists and quislings going on simultaneously with the armed resistance to Nazis. So that in itself is a situation that would require it's own documentary, and I can see that the authors maybe did not wan't to get into explaining those difficult circumstances when it may take too much time. But the sheer amount of film material shown, that I've never seen before, is astonishing to say the least. I watched every episode eyes wide open. And it's that WW2 video material itself that makes this documentary worth having in one's collection.