Not THAT good

Rating: 5/10 (1 January 2004)

OK, it is a pretty good film. It certainly does not glorify war, which always is an excellent point. The performances were all good, though I did not see how Kidman survived as long as she did after her father died and before Zellweger arrived. The human gene pool can be improved at anytime when we lose a person with such poor survival skills (should Paris Hilton be far behind in a Darwinistic world???). So, if the performances were finely crafted, why isn't it the best film of the year? It's trite. You always can guess the outcome of a scene, so the film begins to drag. Jude Law deserved to survive, but after dodging thousands of bullets, he falls slowly from his horse after a pistol shot from a somewhat distant, mounted evil-doer (homage to Dubya). Everyone else in the film explodes when he is shot, but Jude Law melts. Come on. Shane showed us that big calibre guns throw you backward. And even well-aimed shots usually miss moving targets. Mortality in war is luck, not marksmanship, and most wounds are not fatal (check out the wounded vs. killed statistics for Vietnam, for example).