Powerful war drama, but not always believable, and with horrible music

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2003)

I have rather mixed feelings about this film. First the good - the central performances range from solid to excellent, and the evocation of the terrible reality of the wartime situation is powerfully and compellingly done. So, for these reasons, I'd probably recommend the movie to most people. Also it has an effective narrative drive, and the story and characters keep the viewer engaged to the end. But... there are some major problems. For me, the most significant was the score - the music is truly terrible, and does a great deal to ruin the film. If there were an option to simply turn off all the music this would improve the film immeasurably. The constant, intrusive, overbearing, syrupy, pseudo-symphonic accompaniment is utterly at odds with the visual and dramatic content. It's hard to comprehend how a director who could make so many good decisions could make such an awful one - perhaps he simply has a tin ear. There are other problems also... one's suspension of disbelief is frequently challenged. The script seems to have got carried away by a desire to tell a heroic story, and yet it consistently contains within it enough reality to persistently remind the viewer of the unlikeliness of that story. It's like a propagandist who wavers between believing his own output and dealing with the truth around him. And perhaps that post-modern wavering is intended (but I rather doubt it... on the evidence of the film itself, and on the evidence of the accompanying DVD material, which gives no hint of such deliberate sophistication). There are also more mundane problems - the technical portrayal of the performance of snipers is ludicrous (they can hit pinpoint targets, sometimes moving, hundreds of yards away, 100% of the time, sometimes whilst scanning a wide area with only a split-second revelation of the actual target). And the "Hollywood ending" is clearly totally out of place.