It seemed a bit pointless to me. I didn't get it.

Rating: 3/10 (17 May 2008)

I remember watching this movie in my French class a while ago. The whole time I was watching it, I was waiting for a main conflict to arise and bring about a plot line, but this event didn't arrive until the very end of the movie. I thought something important might happen when the Nazis first capture the boys- I was expecting one of them to be sent to a concentration camp, but the Nazis simply drive them back to the school. It seemed a bit anti-climatic. I know it's not an action movie that needs a climax like that, but the entire movie seemed a bit boring and uneventful. It seemed more like a documentary filming the life of a student in France in the 1940s rather than a feature film about a boy's life during WWII.
This made the movie extremely realistic, which is a definite plus, but it seemed too realistic for its own good. Very little of the movie focused on the war itself compared to the main character's life at school. And when you have a movie set during WWII in Europe, with the actual climax of the film involving the Germans, you expect the movie to actually be about the war.
Other than the plot, I don't have many other complaints about this movie. The writing, acting, directing, etc. were fine. For a movie with a rating of 8.1, it should get some people to talk about it, but when my class finished the movie, we all felt sort of indifferent after watching it. No one talked about whether they liked it or not. So the reason I give this movie a rating of 3/10 is not necessarily that I hated the movie, but that I feel the movie is very overrated.