Age of Heroes

I set out watching this movie with minimal expectations given that many war stories typically revolve similar themes. The beginning of the movie all the way through to the mid sections surprised me with strong character plays and development from Sean Bean and the revolving cast. The story line while not new, managed to capture my attention with good acting and keeping the story on the go.

Unfortunately as it nears towards the end, the story seems to have been "chopped off" with a somewhat quick ending to a nicely built up story. I believe this could have been better done with a proper ending to the story.

Good acting though.

This is indeed a very boring and predictable copycatting movie, a "The Dirty Dozen", "The Guns of Navarone", "The Heroes of Telemark (yeah, more like this one copycatted)", and "Where Eagles Dare (copycatted some from this one too) British wannabe but a disastrous one with very weak script and bad casting job. Guys became commandos in this movie were just a bunch of hot-head yoyos who were so easily to cry, yell, shout... and their physical conditions (one of the guy was so skinny) to carry out a dubious mission were also very bad and weak, absolutely unqualified for a tough and dangerous mission. Went to the severe Scandinavian weather and terrain with poor preparation, inappropriate winter gears, logistics, fighting skills.

There was nothing special of their mission, because it's so vague, not Nazi's underground heavy water or atomic bomb development factories. The storyline was just a very thin straight line, so predictable and so boring. The movie just used Sean Bean to fool us to watch it, but the weak screenplay simply didn't give him anything to look great or even good. This is a very bad imitation of those great war movies but failed from the very beginning, never took off in the air 50 feet high and immediately crashed. Watching it was like chewing the same gum over and over for two hours.

In the fall of 2010, I spent a short time on the set of an independent film called "The Boarder," which was being shot in rural Nebraska. And one thing that I did learn while mingling amongst the technicians and actors was that even in something as aesthetically-driven as a motion picture, and with something passionate as a subject matter, it is still entirely possible for things to sour up and become impersonal. Movie-making is not easy, and the stress, I'm afraid, can wear out the artistic drive in some of us, especially if it's an early endeavor. That very well may have been the case, I'm afraid to say, with Adrian Vitoria's "Age of Heroes."

Again, it's hard to imagine a film based on a true story to be passionless and impersonal, but that is the case here. "Age of Heroes" is loosely based on a World War II British commando unit's mission to garner Germany intelligence. The particular mission was drawn up by Ian Fleming, who would later go on to write the James Bond novel series. So a story about men who risked and gave their lives, even in a shoestring budget film like this, is hard to imagine as soulless. But it is.

The way this movie is filmed, acted, scored, and executed, it's as if the filmmakers simply pulled the story out of a box full of potential stories and decided to roll along with it. Because it was their job, not because they particularly wanted to. Filming the battle scenes in this movie must have been very difficult, and unfortunately, the stress the directors and technicians had on them is apparent. It can be felt, and as a result, the scenes, meant to be white-hot, have a sort of staged, phony feeling to them.

There are worthy actors in the movie, headed by Sean Bean, but not one of them as a real part to act. What little personality they have is drawn straight out of previous war pictures. The key example is a tough commando sergeant, played with zest by William Houston; really just a pale imitation of the much-more-impressive gunnery sergeant from Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" back in 1987.

If the film can be redeemed, it is in that it does not appear to aim particularly high. It doesn't have a big goal, so it doesn't accomplish much, and the failure isn't quite as compounding as it otherwise might have been. And a brisk 94 minutes, "Age of Heroes" was already over by the time I was really starting to grow bored.

This is a rather small scale intimate WWII drama about a Commando unit going to Norway to steal some radar technology from a German base there. There are gunfights but not huge battle scenes. Those expecting some super clever espionage because of Ian Fleming will be disappointed. It is a cover mission but it's not a spy yarn.

A little too much time was spent on the commandos training which was tedious. More at the end about how the mission helped the war would have been better.

They show Nazi atrocities towards the Norwegians. Not everyone remembers that Norway suffered during WWII.

Not too many famous actors here except Sean Bean. Overall while not a must see it's an okay watch far war buffs.

It's a solid action flick for sure - nothing terribly new, but it does good work with the WW2 formula that other war flicks have used before.

There is no one flaw I can point to in this film as my reason for giving it a 7, but quite honestly, the thought that stayed in my mind as I watched it was that this film while good, had the potential to be great.

It falls short. The acting and character development is intriguing, but lacks the depth of characters in films like Inglorious Basterds.

It has a fun story, but a little more detail could have may the commando training subplot as well as the rest of the movie so much more.

The beginning is great, but leaves many scenes to the imagination of the viewer. You almost have to wonder if the film was gutted in order to shorten the running time to its fairly short hour and a half.

Like I said, it's good - but it could have been great.