a good movie, near great, but not great

Rating: Null/10 (19 October 2002)

The story unfolds with enough intrigue to be absorbing. This movie has good pacing, it doesn't lag. It is chilling, and I felt disturbed by it afterwards. I find a problem in that the sympathetic point of view is that of a supporting or minor character, Sgt. Marchand of the UN peacekeepers. If this movie was great, one would identify with a major character seeing the anti-war moral through his experiences. That's not possible in this movie since the Serb and Bosnian soldiers trapped are new to combat and not horrified enough to lose their intense partisan feelings. The major characters do not carry the thematic weight of this surprisingly very clinically detached movie. The detachment gives this movie a sheen of objectivity, but it does not cause me to properly suspend my uncritical disbelief about some of its events. For instance, when the two soldiers, Bosnian and Serb, are escorted from the dugout by the UN forces, neither is patted down for weapons, although in each previous encounter the UN has witnessed these two fighting. For that reason one can imagine a plausible ending to this movie that deflates its drama. That is unpleasing because the movie would lose its power to disturb us as it does about warfare.