A terrific movie

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2001)

This movie is a sequel of sorts to "The Longest Day." Just being able to be mentioned in the same sentence with that flick is a pretty high honor, and this movie deserves it. This movie does in fact belong in that same class, along with "Tora, Tora, Tora" and "The Battle of Britain". The movie is more about the war rather than some jerry rigged love story about people caught up in war (see "In Harm's Way", or "Yanks"). Midway can't quite make the same class--too much silliness. Too bad too.
No, it's not perfect--but I think Richard Attenborough deserves high praise for keeping the whole thing together. It couldn't have been easy to deal with all these egos. It's accurate, as far as I understand it, and the actors are given solid scripts. Particular standouts, not surprisingly, are Anthony Hopkins and Gene Hackman. The latter as a Polish General is very well done. And Hopkins is at his best here. The weariness of his character is well done. He seems to be a typical English prig--stuck in a totally bizarre, brutal situation, with very competent German soldiers trying to kill him. And his amusement at wearing forest camouflage in the middle of a city, after they've moved into it, is a nice moment.
There are some who hate war movies because it seems to glorify the killing. Yes, there's some of that--but we would likely have stopped having wars a long time ago if somebody didn't believe it was worth killing to get what he wanted. We can all be as sanctimonious as we want, but war happens. And it's a momentous occurrence, worth making a movie about.
IF there's a flaw here, i'd probably say it was the Caan role, he does the best he can, and it's well filmed, it's just not that interesting. It takes up time, and though I think the movie is not over long, there are other things I'd rather be seeing.
Overall, take it in, ignore the critical comments, I remember when it came out, not a great time for war movies--the late seventies were a pretty dismal time. That colored the response to this well done movie.