Narvik

Here comes another important and interesting movie about the Hitlerian occupation in Norway during the Second World War. It shows accurately how the Nazi and the Norwegian opposition wanted to defend their territory.

The locations were beautiful and the costumes created with authentically.

It's a touching story and I don't want to spoil any details here. I just recommend to check it out on Netflix. The main actors did a good job and the director too. The combat scenes are well executed with good special effects.

The Norwegian locations are beautiful and they are just perfect to turn there this documentary.

7/10.

Yes, it could have done so much more and gone way beyond. But I don't know if that would mean "better". There were plenty of spaces for more facts, arcs, narratives and things to be explored. But I think the fact that they weren't there was by design. Actually the movie made me cry and care about the characters in the end. So I think this is "mission accomplished" isn't it. It has that straightforward cold hearted but yet gentle and beautiful touch of morality and love that Nordic war movies always seem to have. The last 30 minutes are really worth it. And pay attention to the kid, the protagonist couple's kid.

"Kampen om Narvik - Hitler's første nederlag" (in English: The Battle of Narvik - Hitler's first defeat") directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg had a hard time reaching the cinemas, two years after first planned premiere,due to covid and then the eruption of the Ukraine war, but when it finally did it does to full houses across Norway.

The plot follows a soldier, Gunnar, and his family during the outbreak of the war, and the freeing of Narvik, a battle which kept going for 40 days, and we can feel the difficulties of war, with his wife obliged to help as a German translator.

The film is superbly filmed in locations Narvik, Drammen and Rjukan, and the sound is awesome.. the story manages to grip on several levels, and I found it both interesting and good, telling me history I didn't know about from before.

Another good Norwegian war movie, well worth a view.

Ok, first of all: this is a good movie on its own merits. It's got good writing, good pacing and is engaging for what it is. But odds are you're not going to like it if you know your history, and if you don't, this movie isn't going to teach you anything.

The problem, however, is that it tries to deal with two different subject matters at once. It tries to be about the Battle of Narvik, but it also tries to be about the fate of civilians - in particular it tries to show how people could be pushed to collaboration, even though there's only the one example. And this seems to be the main focus of the movie. Had the title been more honest, this would have been a better movie. We are only offered a couple of skirmishes to represent the actual battles, and these skirmishes lack any sense of scale. The landing at Bjerkvik, for example, is represented by a small handful of Norwegians along with 4-5 French and 2-3 Polish soldiers, fighting against 5-10 Germans defending a single railway gun which looked to be no heftier than an 88. And this was the biggest engagement shown.

I don't think I saw a single British soldier in any of the skirmishes - there were a total of three - and the entire Allied operation seemed to hinge on the ability of a single woman to gather intelligence for two British consuls hiding in a shack. If that sounds silly it's because it is.

In the end, I give it a 6/10 because it's an engaging movie - but also quite the disappointment. Had they ommitted all the "battle" scenes, focused entirely on the female protagonist and her struggle between doing right by her family or right by her country, and not pretended this was a movie about the Battle of Narvik, this would have been a better movie.

While looking at what others said on here I found one outstanding and very comprehensive review. I completely agree with everything said by Erik_Surewaard and hope he won't mind me quoting part of his to make up the word count. I strongly recommend reading Erik's comments in full.

If I read quite some of the other user reviews, I see many complaints about the movie being too focussed on the story of one family. This instead of on the battle itself. And I can partially agree with those comments. But to use this as the main argument for giving this movie an IMDd rating of only somewhere between 1 to 4 stars, is totally unjustified. This is like saying that "Titanic" is a bad movie because it focusses to much on a love story between two people...

I personally think that "Narvik" succeeded pretty well considering its relative meagre production budget of 'only' 63.2 million Norwegian Kroner, equalling around 6.4 million US$. So before drawing conclusions, let's first take a look at a comparable... For instance "Das Boot" - a WW2 movie that was made in germany over 40 years ago - had a budget of 15 million US$. And mind you, those are 1981 dollars! So it seems that a budget of 6.4 million is peanuts if you want to make a WW2 movie.