An Honest Appraisal On The Absurdities Of War

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2005)

This is a very good film focused on the break up of the former Yugoslavia and the war surrounding it. It cleverly makes a point about the horror of war without having to go into gory detail. We often become desensitised to the effects of war - all we see is a newspaper headline or a 30 second news bulletin; this film goes some way to reveal the reality. But the movie is not just an intellectual exercise: the black humour will make you chuckle and you'll also be gripped by the storyline.
The film is based around two characters from opposing sides in the war who end up stuck in "no mans land" between the two warring factions. It creates a darkly comic situation of two enemy soldiers having to cooperate to get to safety. It's interesting to see that the characters are often unable to cooperate because of the blind nationalism and petty prejudices that armed conflicts create.
I have only one criticism: the second half of the film introduced numerous United Nations personnel and the media as additional characters (the UN trying to rescue the soldiers in "no mans land", the media reporting on it), and frankly I thought the film was poorer for it. It simply tried to cover too much ground and too many issues and the attention on the main characters became diluted. Perhaps the scriptwriter wanted to make a point, but showing that the media are like vultures in a wartime scenario seems an obvious statement to me and none of the media characters were in the least bit interesting. Their appearance became a tedious distraction from the intrigue. In my view, a better approach would have been just to script the UN's role in this war and its methodology (something which may surprise many people) and just have the media as peripheral figures. It is for this reason that I have given the film 8/10 rather than a higher rating.
Overall, though, I can say that investing your time and money in watching this film is well worth it. It is one of the best films I have seen in the last five years.