Good, but overrated, and its growing worse

Rating: 6/10 (25 January 2020)

I can see this going the way of Shawshank or Dark Knight, movies I was originally neutral towards but got ruined over time by the fanbase making them into the most overrated trash of all time. This movie, while good, is already starting to go the same way. I saw this movie about two weeks ago, and over the past week I keep having to remind myself "oh yeah, I did see that movie". The pacing works and the movie did feel shorter than it was, but I also spaced out frequently while watching it, and much of the scenery was repetitive, which I know given that the war was mainly trench warfare you're going to have a lot of that, it still felt like watching one of those old Hannah-Barbara cartoons where the characters run against the same recycled background that keeps looping every few seconds, trench, trench, no man's land, trench, field, city, trench. Also, know how in Big Bang Theory, one of the characters points out that in Raiders, Indie's presence is totally superfluous and the plot would've played out the same way even if he wasn't there? This movie suffers from the same exact problem: the plot and main character are totally superfluous. If they needed to get an urgent message across, the common practice was to simply fly a plane and drop the message down. There. Simple as that. There would've been zero reason to send two people on foot, unless maybe the unit didn't have any planes available, which seems a bit of a stretch. People keep going on about the trick photography where its edited to look like one continuous shot. Okay? Rope has done that. Birdman has done that. Most impressively, Russian Ark was literally one single hour and a half shot with no editing tricks. That's an achievement. There's nothing new to what this movie does. It's pretty standard American War fare (I know this movie is English, but Brit and Yank war movies are the same, they have the same sensibility, the same POV), no different than Private Ryan or Band of Brothers or Dunkirk or Hacksaw Ridge.