Heroic ritual

Rating: Null/10 (9 March 2015)

This is another of those war movies where existentialism becomes about desperate men traipsing through a blasted landscape strewn with debris and mangled shapes of a life that failed to make sense and provide order that prevents it.
Existentialism originally comes from studies on the logic of perception but somewhere along the way it has come to mean, in lay terms and otherwise, laments about how cold and repetitively pointless life can be, with only negative connotations. No matter. This hue came about by minds aghast by a couple of world wars and no real peace after.
It is WWII so we can have it all fairly removed from the doublebinds of politics and shrouded in common myth, a necessary struggle against evil but one that mitigates the horror and pain? The soldiers are for most of the film inside tanks so we can have visual imagery of men crawling through that horror in metal hulls that are as much weapon as they are home and self.
But the most important thing for me in something like this, is there insight of the urges behind that madness, insight of the rituals that make it up and diffuse it? Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Red and the White, Thin Red Line, they all attempt these insights.
There is one here, a startling insight as the disheveled crewmembers from the same tank gatecrash rudely a German home where their commander has sought a few moments of refuge away from the carnage and a calm meal cooked by a German mother.
In the next room the young greenhorn recruit has just had sex with the beautiful daughter, which underscores something we've been seeing for most of the film and should be the existential focus, that this is a war where good and evil should be on clear sides, but beneath this duality we see life as a parade of games and rituals; the tank battles on a field, the ribbing of the greenhorn recruit by the grizzled veterans, the bartering of sex for safety and a meal.
So when their cohorts foul up this moment of quiet, we see a few of those things with some clarity, how it's not some other cruelty that gives rise to war than what we see in that room, their sudden pettiness and vindictiveness, how evil doesn't think of itself as evil and how it's really ego and ignorance. How morality is nothing more than a bunch of agreements we make and decide to uphold and how easy it is to tear up once you are excluded from the benefits.
So this is more or less fine, some flaws of formulaic style rather than observation. But the end is where it completely loses me.
We have rituals throughout the film, and in the end we have the most momentous one that decides life and death for these people but now it becomes a defiant stand of the brave few against the many, mawkish and reductive when this is the climax to a WWII movie but without any insight either. Of course it plays long enough for us to see a last German soldier keeping silent, sparing a pointless death, and this too a part of gamesmanship.