Too Hollywood

Rating: 5/10 (13 January 2019)

Your typical Hollywood film following the righteous and genuine Dax, the too typical American-styled hero, as he fights against the system of justice, represented by the cold and removed bureaucrat-officers, for his men, the simple and victimized soldiers. This sums up the entirety of the story: another sad one-man crusade against the evils of the "system": just another hero who has enough of a heart to do the right thing, enough of wit and bureaucratic standing to be able to, enough under his command to prove that he's that great leader of the people that we all want, and enough simplicity to make us identify with him as some genuine friend.
For me, the adjectives "hollywood" or "hero" comes way before "anti-war" or anything of the like. The characters were way too flat. There were way too many scenes at the chateau: apart from the night patrol and our heroic Dax charging across no-man's land with a shiny hand-pistol, the war was never developed as a scene. There were scenes of beautiful cinematography from time to time, especially the scene of Dax going through his soldiers, it was more absurd than anything else: the wondering eyes of the soldiers looking lackadaisically, the various things they were doing (that cigar), and the removedness we sense even from the eyes of our hero Dax.
In the end we see the soldiers in the tavern calling on the German girl, an exotic piece captured and up for display for the soldiers' entertainment, who does not communicate. She sings a folk song, and the soldiers join in, only humming: was it a song they knew also in French (or English) or did it "speak" to them through the language barrier on some beautiful universal thing called humanity? No. They were only humming because they were perhaps touched by the sincerity of the scene, they wanted to express some sort of response. Perhaps it was the world for the German girl, but was just another amusement for the French soldiers, a distraction that even Dax yielded to and a useful one as well as many of them would be dead the next day. Not so different from this film.