An honest review from an impartial adult viewer

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2020)

I knew nothing of the film heading into the theatre other than it was based on WW1.
Cinematography, lighting, yes brilliant. That of course doesn't make a film deserve an 8.7 rating.
This is a war film for the Marvel generation. There is limited emotion shown by the main characters, scenes that suspend reality and cliche, cliche, cliche.
Our hero finds a bucket of unspoilt milk at an abandoned farmhouse beside the only cow in sight.
A trip wire is tripped by a rat in a bunker in which the two soldiers are in, one is in scratched while the other is buried under rubble, He is dragged out of the rubble with not a scratch, only to have some dust in his eyes. Yet the explosion was so significant it forces the entire large bunker to collapse.
Our hero is shot at by a sniper while crossing the bridge. I thought at this point that we finally might be able to see a tense scene. In other good war films this game of cat and mouse might have lasted several minutes. No need. Our hero somehow immediately locates the position of the sniper and is able to shoot and would him. Stunning marksmanship.
Yet only two scenes later our hero is running through a town in rubble being shot at by German soldiers no more than 20 yards away and isn't hit.
The worst part though, even worse than the tacky scene with the French woman and child, is his escapade down the river, through the rapids, and down a waterfall only the exit the river right at the point at which the battalion he was attempting to locate is luckily only 15 yards away.
Things just seem to randomly work out for our hero, and quickly. There needed to be a few sequences where the hero is faced with the enormity of the situation, loneliness, desolation. Rather each time one chapter is finished he is immediately assisted in movies to the next.
This film pales in comparison to films like Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. An opportunity lost. I left the cinema modestly entertained yet empty and disappointed.