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IMDbPro

Passchendaele

  • 2008
  • R
  • 1h 54m
IMDb RATING
6.4/10
9.1K
YOUR RATING
Caroline Dhavernas and Paul Gross in Passchendaele (2008)
The lives of a troubled veteran, his nurse girlfriend and a naive boy intersect first in Alberta and then in Belgium during the bloody World War I battle of Passchendaele.
Play trailer2:11
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9 Photos
Historical EpicPeriod DramaTragedyTragic RomanceWar EpicDramaHistoryRomanceWar

The lives of a troubled veteran, his nurse girlfriend and a naive boy intersect first in Alberta and then in Belgium during the bloody World War I battle of Passchendaele.The lives of a troubled veteran, his nurse girlfriend and a naive boy intersect first in Alberta and then in Belgium during the bloody World War I battle of Passchendaele.The lives of a troubled veteran, his nurse girlfriend and a naive boy intersect first in Alberta and then in Belgium during the bloody World War I battle of Passchendaele.

  • Director
    • Paul Gross
  • Writer
    • Paul Gross
  • Stars
    • Paul Gross
    • Michael Greyeyes
    • James Kot
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.4/10
    9.1K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Paul Gross
    • Writer
      • Paul Gross
    • Stars
      • Paul Gross
      • Michael Greyeyes
      • James Kot
    • 127User reviews
    • 30Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 11 wins & 5 nominations total

    Videos1

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    Photos8

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    Top cast60

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    Paul Gross
    Paul Gross
    • Michael Dunne
    Michael Greyeyes
    Michael Greyeyes
    • Highway
    James Kot
    James Kot
    • Skinner
    Jesse Frechette
    Jesse Frechette
    • Peters
    Rainer Kahl
    • German Gunner
    Landon Liboiron
    Landon Liboiron
    • German Soldier
    Caroline Dhavernas
    Caroline Dhavernas
    • Sarah Mann
    Patricia Benedict
    • Nursing Matron
    Hugh Probyn
    • Carmichael
    Jim Mezon
    • Dobson-Hughes
    Brian Dooley
    Brian Dooley
    • McKinnon
    Joe Dinicol
    Joe Dinicol
    • David Mann
    Meredith Bailey
    • Cassie Walker
    Robert Nogier
    • Harper
    Francis Damberger
    • Mayor Costello
    David Ley
    • Dr. Walker
    Judith Buchan
    Judith Buchan
    • Mrs. Costello
    David Lawrence Brown
    David Lawrence Brown
    • Dr. Bernard
    • (as Dave Brown)
    • Director
      • Paul Gross
    • Writer
      • Paul Gross
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews127

    6.49K
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    Featured reviews

    Wizard-8

    Made with passion, but falls quite short

    There was great hoopla around "Passchendaele" in 2008, with the hope that it would bring in great audiences when released. However, the box office take in its native Canada was only average, and it faired worse in the international market - the only foreign market it played in theaters was with a (brief) British release, and in the United States the DVD label that picked it up was a small DVD company that specialized in releasing public domain movies.

    Seeing the movie, it's easy to see why not that many people were attracted to it. The first half of the movie is pretty awful. I know the intent of this first half was to illustrate war on the home front - which you don't often see in war movies - but it fails in its intentions. The dialogue is downright awful at times, the characters are very familiar, and it's REAL slow going. Even worse is that despite the expense put into the movie, the look and feel of the movie here is like one found with a cheapo drama broadcast on the CBC television network.

    The second half of the movie - moving to the Passchendaele battlefields - is a bit more successful than the first half. The battlefield and the battlefield fighting come across as gritty and authentic, and the movie finally has a theatrical feeling to it. However, the movie still suffers from bad dialogue, throwing in ridiculous symbolism as well. Worse of all, the struggle for Passchendaele doesn't last that long - all of a sudden, we're told Passchendaele has been taken. Huh?

    Had writer/director/actor Paul Gross had set the movie entirely on the battlefield AND had someone smart working with him to correct the shortcomings of his screenplay, we might have had something here. But as it is, the movie ends up being a big disappointment. What's worse is that this movie's mostly bad reception means that it will probably be a long, long time before some other Canadian tries to make a "big" movie that will attract a large domestic audience - if ever.
    ametaphysicalshark

    "Passchendaele" is a wonderful tribute to our heroes who fought for us and to Canada

    "Passchendaele" gives us twenty plus minutes of brutal, miserable, genuinely horrific trench warfare towards the end of the film. During that time it is the sort of gritty, relentlessly (but not gratuitously) violent war film many will and have gone into the theater thinking it would be. Apart from the short five to ten minutes which opens the film there are no other scenes of battle, and the movie is better for it.

    What Paul Gross has attempted here is to give Canadians their own war epic (and on a minuscule budget when compared to most Hollywood war films). The film is not interested in philosophizing and 'making a point'. It's something like a far, far better version of what Michael Bay was doing with "Pearl Harbor"; the film is an unabashed romance and period drama, with Passchendaele being not the focus, but the event at the end of the road which the audience knows is coming.

    Paul Gross has achieved something with "Passchendaele". We see so many Canadian films every year, but very few if any of them are ever about Canada, about being Canadian (and the film doesn't shy away from depicting some of the darker sides of that, we see the hatred and pain many German Canadians experienced simply due to their origin reflected in Dunn's love interest). More than just that, "Passchendaele" is a love letter to Canada, and although I might be biased as a Calgarian and Albertan (where the film is set), I think that every Canadian will find a reason to be proud in this film, in spite of the fact that it's depicting a war where nobody really knew what they were fighting for. "Passchendaele" has its flaws. There's some really, really heavy-handed symbolism (which thankfully doesn't ruin the film) and cloying sentimentality. While I normally abhor cloying sentimentality, "Passchendaele" must be doing something right because I was with it every step of the way. There isn't a moment in this film where the characters don't feel real, where the story doesn't affect you, where the romance doesn't feel genuine (including a love scene which could have been laughable but ended up being one of the year's most beautiful scenes).

    "Passchendaele" is Paul Gross' heart poured onto the screen. The man is perhaps best known for his light-hearted role on "Due South", but he is a phenomenal dramatic actor and his performance here is probably the best I've seen this year from a male lead. You can feel his character's pain, his joy, his suffering, his love. Gross spent 12 years on the screenplay, and while I'd love to say the final result is perfect it is not. It is still, however, a screenplay so filled with genuine emotion and such passion that it ends up being something rare and special. It's a wonderful, wonderful film, one which attempts no grand statement on what war is or should be, it simply shows us the emotions of those involved in it.

    I could go on at length complimenting the wonderful cast, explaining the story, discussing the film in detail, but that would be pointless. It's a film every Canadian should see. I honestly don't know if there's anything here for non-Canadians, although I imagine the film is populist enough to entertain most people (there's even a healthy dose of well-written humor, and the movie has one line so hilarious and yet oddly seductive that I'll probably never forget it). I've said it already, but I'll say it again: writer, director, and star Paul Gross has achieved something special with "Passchendaele". It's a tribute to many things. Less importantly perhaps it is a tribute to Calgary and Alberta (only a Calgarian could have made this film), and more importantly it's a tribute to the pure, certain feeling of true love, to our war veterans, to the troops currently fighting in Afghanistan, to all Canadians, and ultimately and most importantly to Canada.
    7stephenjmurray

    Decent World War One film should not have flopped.

    Passchendaele is a decent World War One film, one of the best out there and there's not too many it has minor flaws but does the job brilliantly. Paul Gross has done a great job acting in and directing this film. Some may be put off by the love story but for me this just reinforces and shows the losses of many people during this time period and era. Passchendaele shows how many people who once lived to together as neighbors are divided by stupid things like family nationality and false loyalty and bad promises of adventure and glory.

    The love story isn't for everyone but wow many girlfriends and wives lost partners and how many young men never came home to true love or had a chance to live full lives? This film does get you thinking!

    Of course this is no Band Of Brothers in terms of scale (I know that's World War Two) but Paul Gross has done extremely well acting and directly. I find this film to be a good tribute to his Grandfather and to those who lost something because of World War One.

    The film is low budget however this doesn't really show to be honest and this is a fitting tribute and good story! With regards to the low budget the battle scenes could have been bigger and better but this is by no means a bad film.

    The acting and casting is spot on and this film really does show the stupid ill placed passion and faulted logic of young people in this era and, it shows the pressure many had to go through and be forced to fight for freedom not knowing what the loses and costs would be. World War One was a slaughter and waste of millions of lives and the deaths of certain characters and the gruesome way they die shows this war was not the fairy tale adventures many painted it to be at the start.

    Among all the blood and slaughter there is a story and the film does well to reflect and show not everyone fighting was a murderer or cold blooded killer and many just wanted it to end.

    We need more World War One films like this to teach young people the truths and to keep history alive so we don't make the same mistakes again.
    10cyberscribe

    Wow. Great flick!

    Wow. Great flick!

    Besides being an admitted movie addict, I'm also a retired professional soldier and a combat veteran who's served in multiple theaters of conflict.

    I usually find myself quietly disappointed with war movies in general, and their vain, highly stylized, cliché-laden attempts to realistically portray infantry warfare, and high-intensity warfare's effects on soldiers. Film-makers invariably seem to fall far short in their attempts to capture the essence of what war can be (or was) like, and what exposure to it can do to the people involved, both mentally and physically.

    To his great credit, I think that in Passchendaele Paul Gross seems to have actually managed to capture a reasonably authentic glimpse into both the nature of such hellish environments and the men caught up in them.

    The acting was superb. The performances were so convincing that the notion that I was just sitting watching a movie didn't even occur to me until the credits began to roll by, I was so totally engrossed.

    This film was easily one of the best that I've seen in quite some time.

    I'll definitely be keeping my eyes open for any future films by Paul Gross. Passchendaele stands as an extremely impressive testimonial to his obvious talents.
    7sddavis63

    It Makes The Point That While Soldiers May Be, War Itself Is Neither Glorious Nor Noble

    War movies are not exactly a typical Canadian genre, and so I've been wanting to see "Passchendaele" for some time. As a war movie, this is very well done. Both the opening - depicting Sgt. Dunne's role in an unnamed battle - and the closing - which follows Dunne and Mann through a portion of the Battle of Passchendaele - are graphic and believable representations of battle, and they provide a sobering view of war, which may be necessary (that's another debate for another time) but is certainly neither glorious nor noble, although the individual soldiers who fight may well be both. The subtle (or perhaps not so subtle if one has ever read the Gospel accounts of Jesus' crucifixion) religious overtone to the closing scenes of the battle as Dunne effectively carries his cross across the battlefield (it's necessary to watch the movie to understand that) is also powerful. The soldiers who lived through this insanity would also be carrying their own crosses for the rest of their lives.

    The weakness of the movie is found in the middle hour, between the battle scenes. The portion of the movie set in Calgary raised significant questions about patriotism, loyalty, duty, etc., but is also rather slowly paced. Dunne, having returned home suffering from shell- shock after the opening battle is assigned to recruitment duty. Falling in love with the nurse who treated him, he discovers that her brother is anxious to sign up, in order to win the respect of the father of the girl he loves but more to regain his family's honour, which he feels was tainted by his father, who was born in Germany and returned home to fight for Germany, eventually dying in battle against Canadian troops at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. That story is interesting, but it's slow pace is quite a contrast to the chaos of the battle scenes - perhaps appropriately so - and makes this part of the movie seem perhaps even slower than it really is.

    The performances from the two main leads (Paul Gross as Dunne, and Caroline Dhavernas as Sarah, the nurse he falls in love with) were excellent. I was a bit put off by the tear-jerker ending of the movie, but that turned out to be key to the last and haunting shot of the Canadian war cemetery, with rows upon rows of crosses (to paraphrase Lt. Col. John McCrae's famous poem) and a riderless horse in the background. An extremely well-done movie, indeed. 7/10

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Paul Gross wrote and directed this film, and its closing song "After the War." His grandfather, Michael Joseph Dunne, a WWI vet, once confessed to a young Gross about bayoneting a young lad in the forehead. Gross later said on Dunne's deathbed he was muttering for forgiveness and he was the only one who knew what was being talked about.
    • Goofs
      In the climactic battle sequence (1:33'51'' mark) as a German soldier stabs a fallen body, the bayonet bends as if made of rubber.
    • Quotes

      Michael Dunne: Do you think maybe I could accompany you to a dance, or...?

      Sarah Mann: I don't dance with soldiers.

      Michael Dunne: I could lose the uniform.

      Sarah Mann: I don't dance with naked soldiers.

    • Crazy credits
      During the end credits, Black and White footage of the real battle of Passchendaele are shown.
    • Soundtracks
      After the War
      Performed by Sarah Slean

      Written by Paul Gross and David Keeley

      Courtesy of Debmeister Music Publishing

      Produced by Asher Lenz and Jack Lenz

      [Played during the end credits]

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    • Did Passchendaele really fall to the Germans again shortly afterwards?

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • October 17, 2008 (Canada)
    • Country of origin
      • Canada
    • Languages
      • English
      • German
      • French
    • Also known as
      • La bataille de Passchendaele
    • Filming locations
      • Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada
    • Production companies
      • Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund
      • Damberger Film & Cattle Co.
      • Rhombus Media
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Budget
      • CA$20,000,000 (estimated)
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 54 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
      • Black and White
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby Digital
      • DTS
    • Aspect ratio
      • 2.35 : 1

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