A star-studded 70's disaster movie set against the backdrop of an Allied defeat in World War II

Rating: 7/10 (27 July 2016)

A Bridge Too Far falls under its own weight in many ways with a lot of distracting cameos and an overly bombastic score. Also, it stumbles right out of the gate with a completely historically inaccurate and oversimplified narration that certainly angered any veterans of the Eastern, Italian, or African Fronts by erroneously claiming that up until D-Day the Germans were winning the war. Much of the rest of the writing falters under banalities and clichés, with some real life historical figures such as British General Browning and German Field Marshall Model portrayed as utterly incompetent (winning The Battle of Arhhem only because of luck and British hubris rather than due to his own ability). As usual for most old-fashioned war movies, the Germans are portrayed as largely heartless and often doltish with the Americans heroic, the British pompous, and the Poles and Dutch as noble victims of their circumstances.
However, the film has a lot going for it that World War II films up to that point hadn't done. The battle scenes manage to attain a level of chaos, brutality, and realism unmatched for another 20 years. In addition to showcasing a lot of fairly accurate equipment, the action is edited well with great sound design (aside from those squeaky "beep" ricochets) and pyrotechnics. The scene where XXX Corp. first encounters the German lines with its devastating artillery barrage and then stumbling into an ambush ranks among my favorite war scenes, accurately portraying the sheer wide-scale savagery and how quickly great plans can fall apart.
As usual for "big" movies of the time, there really isn't a plot or character arcs because of just how many overlapping stories and vignettes there are. A few bigger stars like James Caan, Robert Redford, and Elliot Gould get only 2 scenes - one small one to introduce their character and one larger one in which they do something memorable to service the action, usually calling back to something their character said in their introduction as though each one had some vaguely ironic prescient ability. Some of the stunt-casting actually makes the film worse, such as Gene Hackman doing his best but completely failing to fool anyone into believing he's Polish.
History buffs, such as myself, will get a big kick though out of the straightforwardness of the presentation of Operation Market Garden. It's interesting even to see the generals posit over maps and see their plans come to fruition inter-cut with the small stories of the regular people on the ground. The operation certainly deserved a big picture to tell its story and with impressively mounted spectacle in the age before CGI and visual effects. The larger screen you watch it on and the more interested in WW2 history you are, the more impressed you'll be.