omelette-567-92656

I was just after watching Mission Impossible 2 for the umpteenth time, was curious as to its IMDb rating, and was shocked when I noticed that WOTW is rated higher - how can seemingly-rational people rate this POS higher then MI2??? Some reviewers here actually rated this at 8-stars - which is frankly absurd!

As a huge fan of Jeff Wayne's WOTW musical (which I bought on cassette-tapes way back then) I was curious to see how Spielberg would portray the simplistic WOTW premise to a 21'th century audience. He failed - HUGE!!! This is a real turkey of a film, pure and simple! If there were ever Spielberg-sycophants that thought his 'genius' could do no wrong, well, this movie disproves that notion.

Yet, it's rated higher than MI2 - go figure! I have a theory though - these absurdly-high ratings for mediocre films are generally from people, who after watching it at a movie theater, feel compelled to justify to themselves the admission-fee by awarding it a high-rating. Nothing else makes sense.

Apart from the special-effects, this movie is awful.

I have always been somewhat skeptical of the IMDb ratings, and have watched many 5-6 star IMDb-rated movies that have proved excellent. So I was doubtful that WOI was really as bad as the 2.5 stars suggested - boy, was I wrong! This really is a stinker, the worst movie I have ever seen in fact. The people that are bitching about the cheesy CGI really need to focus on what matters - the best special-effects in the world count for nothing if the film has a plot, script and actors not worth a damn! The script is so bad that I'm wondering if this is not some kind of inside-joke as others have suggested. Having watched the entire thing, I could pull the script apart line-by-line, but for what - suffice it to say that whoever was responsible seems to have suffered from attention-deficit-disorder.

This movie is so bad, it's in fact a gem of sorts - more people should have done themselves a favor and watched it in it's entirety - after all, without being familiar with what's truly bad, you fail to appreciate the really great films to the fullest extent.

Having just watched this, I thought it was an incredible series. Burt Lancaster did a great job narrating throughout. The Soviet producers could have been a little more forthcoming regarding casualty-statistics I thought - for instance, we are always given a figure of what the German casualties were after each major battle, but hardly ever one for their Soviet counterpart. Understandable, but a little frustrating if you are a bean-counter like me! I thought the musical-score to be merely adequate. What I really liked were the 2 music-tracks that are triggered by the DVD menus, superb!

What struck me though as a 'Westerner' was how little I knew about this titanic struggle to begin with. The pro-western school systems certainly seem to have done a great job marginalizing the Soviet's role in World War II, where in reality, they practically destroyed the entire Nazi war-machine single-handedly - as one commenter mentioned, they were responsible for 88% of all Nazi-casualties during the war - but at an incredible cost! The "World At War" series also seems to just gloss over these facts as well, much to it's shame - which is why I suppose most of the 'great-unwashed' (not just Americans) believe that the USA had a much bigger hand in the European war than they actually did. Another reviewer's comment here about a recent American Poll revealing that a considerable number of Americans though that the US fought WITH the Germans AGAINST the Soviets had me LOL'ing though - if that's true, well, the mind boggles...

I was however amazed and bemused by some of the reviewer's comments here. Most that are critical appear to be using the word "Propaganda" completely out of context - there is almost no evangelizing of Communist Ideals anywhere in the entire series!!! But then the 'anti-propagandists' reveal their hand - the real problem is that it doesn't contain material that THEY almost insist, should have been included - mainly involving Stalin and his purges! This is about the Great Patriotic War, not an overview of Soviet History in the 20th century. Yes, Stalin was a monster, but as the documentary clearly states, Stalin was not a military man so gave his generals free reign in running the war, and as a result is barely seen in the whole series. More to the point, most of the world at the time in question (1941-1945) had no inklings of any of this, so why include it - again, this documentary was about the USSR's GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR!

So overall, very well made and well worth watching.