Complex war drama

Rating: Null/10 (5 October 2000)

To call this an "anti war" movie is to do it gross injustice. It is instead a complex analysis of human violence: the underlying causes, motivations and situations that comprise any conflict. This really is Peckinpah's best, or at least up there with Wild Bunch. Just the setting is extraordinary--a group of German soldiers set on the eastern front against the Russians, neither side is particularly admirable. Peckinpah is known for his study of the masculine, and has been accused of glorifying violence. Here one could easily argue that he does just that--the fighting is brutal, ugly, frightening, and ultimately exhilarating.
Coming out of many, many wars--through all the horror, the brutality, the gore, the mangled corpses, men coming back from battle--many shattered, have written that it was also the most intense time of their lives. SP seems to take that idea and study why it might be--the platoon here are not cardboard heroes, they live in filth, they kill and are killed, and have an almost permanent sense of fatigue. And they seem to desperately want to go home--but they don't, they fight, live their lives intensely. They do their duty, they fight the battles, not merely for survivial, but for ... well that's the question. In the movie "Anzio" Robert Mitchum claims that wars are fought because men like it. Peckinpah doesn't say anything so simple--he confronts the viewer with intense images, violence and heroism, killing and surpising tenderness, and leaves it there.

There's a trenchant scene where a German General is confronted with a horribly disfigured soldier--Peckinpah seems to want to make you see all sides of the black power of War, which has always been with us. Peckinpah doesn't have much in the way of female characters--they seem added on, the real essence is Peckinpah's careful and close study why males have an indescribable urge to kill one another.