Pathfinders: Vers la victoire

From the first note of the opening song, this film blunders from anachronism to anachronism with the gay abandon of a film club of 10 year olds. Carefully chosen music that wouldn't be heard for 40 years; vehicles chosen perhaps for comfort rather than any likeness to anything that may have been seen in the US Military; a fascinating variety of guns, most of which bear more resemblance to plastic toys than actual weapons; military huts ordered direct from today's DIY catalogues; trees and casual wild life purportedly in England that never grew outside North America. In the end it's more a game of spot the idiocy than watch the film. Lighting and cameras compete with the director to find the most artistic shots, that of course don't work as art or film, and simply mystify as to their part in a plot which is harder to find than the Pathfinders' actual landing point. Tension is created more by having actors squabble than from real tension points. Characters you don't care about, in places that never existed, doing things that don't make sense ... badly. War films are just too well-researched and lovingly and accurately put together these days for this rubbish to shine in anything except ... well ... a rubbish dump! This is an insult to the real people who really suffered doing real heroic deeds.

I like a good war film and this is not a good war film. Awful close ups all the time. They should be used for dramatic effect not in every scene or cutaway. Terrible sound as if recorded in a toilet. This was shot on 35mm? What a waste. Civilian period costumes awful. The English country house? Obviously set in in USA. We did not have double glazed front doors, Lelandi firs, and a totally terrible period interior. Dialogue lacked lustre and to be quite honest I didn't care what they said after an hour of meaningless trite dialogue.Acting from the school of bad acting.Fast pace? What movie were you watching? Lighting done with a forty watt bulb and at other times with a exterior floodlight from the Home Depot. The locations were a joke. Have you ever been to Normandy or even researched the locations? They don't have a re-occurring picket fence and country paths but high hedgerows and flat plains. It looked as if it was all filmed on someones country estate. As for the largest exterior set used in a low budget film, I would ask for a refund. Didn't you you do any research yet again. I note the DOP is not mentioned in the enormous credit list. I take it he was too ashamed to put his name to it. Everything was seriously flawed in one way or another and I could go on and on but I have wasted enough time on this already. Why did I give it a 2? The aeroplanes, you could have made more of them.

I'm probably in the minority here but I found this film to be a steaming pile of "could have". It could have been better, it could have used a bigger budget, it could have used a better director and better actors. And most of all it could have used a better cinematographer.

From the very start of the film it's pretty obvious that this is an extremely low budget effort for the extremely ambitious story they are trying to tell. And unfortunately this just is NOT done well. I've seen lo-budget war pictures before that ended up being extremely effective. In the main they used a fairly limited number of sets and actors and tried to tell "smaller" stories. Pathfinders is an attempt to tell a very large story on a shoestring.

The opening of the movie has a woman singing a song that sounds nothing like a period piece. The wardrobe is just barely up from Halloween costume quality. And the acting is stiff and phony. And it doesn't get any better. Hiring a bunch of amateur hour actors so that you can spend most of your limited budget trying (unsuccessfully) to make your film look authentic is a bad bad idea.

Another irritating thing is the very initial premise of the movie. The use of Pathfinders before the D-Day invasion has been a secret for 60 years. HUH??? Secret from who for crying out loud? Anyone with even a passing interest in WW2 history knows that. It may well be true that nobody made a movie about just that exact facet of D-Day before but it sure as hell hasn't been a secret for 60 years. Pathfinders are at least mentioned in several films, including The Longest Day.

Despite all of the shortcomings of the film, my biggest gripe is with the camera work. Why the heck are there so many needless closeups? Are they trying to hide the shoddy quality of the sets and wardrobe? Honestly this is not the worst film I've ever seen. If it was just a low budget effort with some shortcomings I'd probably give it a 5 or 6 out of 10 rating. BUT it's a movie that never should have been made for this kind of budget! There are some things you just cannot pull off successfully without money. And the people behind this film would have done a lot better if they had tried to work within budget limitations. Ignoring the small budget and trying to do it anyway is just a case of stupidity and arrogance.

3 out of 10.

I wanted to like this movie, but I'm afraid I just couldn't - sorry. Here are my main faults.

1) Film-makers -here's a tip - the CLOSE-UP can be an effective tool in story telling, BUT if you ONLY use close ups and never any other angles, it just ends up feeling like you are trapped in a cardboard box with the actors.

2) The lighting - TOO DARK. I had to adjust the settings on my TV to make out the action and in the end I just couldn't tell who the different characters were. Which brings me to....

3) Characters - except for 3 or 4 guys I just didn't know who was who. There was not enough time spent developing any personalities before we head off to France and.....

4) France - and particularly Normandy. Had anyone involved in the film ever been to Normandy? The roads, fields and countryside used for filming look NOTHING like Normandy and what was with that brand new American style wooden fence. There is NOTHING like that in Normandy.

5) Acting - Now I know that I shouldn't expect Matt Damon and other A-listers in every film. But where did they find this lot? Bar a couple of exceptions they were all awful. Surely there are college actors out there who don't sound like they are reading everything off idiot boards? As I say, I wanted to like this film, I know some of the guys who were filmed jumping and others involved in the original concept. But, this truly is a piece of garbage. Well intended perhaps - but a piece of garbage nonetheless.

Sorry

Three companies of paratroopers travel in a deadly mission to France to prepare the drop zone for the airborne attack on the D-Day. They have to install an Eureka transmitter and searchlight to guide the planes in the Normandy invasion.

"Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers" is a dreadful and lame war movie - maybe the worst I have ever seen. The "untold and lost story" is disrespectful with the true Normandy invasion and the screenplay is awful without character development and poor dialogs. The direction is also awful with permanent close up camera and terrible soundtrack of machine gun all the time. The acting is ridiculously amateurish. The "battle scenes" are so fake and there is one particularly corny scene, when the German soldier throws a grenade in the trench, one paratrooper shows it to the others and uses his body to contain the explosion instead of throwing it back. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Desbravadores: Na Companhia de Estranhos" ("Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers")

Note: On 20 March 2021, I saw this film again.