Scary.

Rating: 10/10 (31 January 2005)

It really is a testament to the power of the story told by this film that it stars the French army and they all speak nothing but English, and yet it is still be incredibly moving and compelling. On the other hand, the movie is not really about war but about the soldiers, kind of like Full Metal Jacket. It is structured almost exactly the opposite, with the first half of the film taking place on the battlefield and the second half off. Kirk Douglas plays Col. Dax, whose platoon is ordered to take a hill called the Anthill against staggering odds, almost surely a suicide mission.
As the men rush out of the trenches in an attempt to complete the mission, I was reminded of Gallipoli as they were all mowed down within feet of exiting the trenches. It becomes clear that the mission is, ahem, impossible, and is abandoned. Where the movie is truly great is in its characterizations and the complexity of their relationships with one another. Watch, for example, the roles that certain characters play at the beginning and where they end up near the end of the film, such as the General who ordered soldiers to fire on their own men and the man who abandons two of his men on a watch, resulting in one of their deaths and the subsequent court martial and trial of the other. The situations that they end up in are what make the movie powerful.
Clearly, the accepted forms of punishment for failing to accomplish a mission are frightening. I have no idea how accurate they are as to French military practices at the time, but for three soldiers to be taken at random and tried and sentenced to death because their entire platoon failed in an impossible mission is scary indeed. I wonder how they would have handled a few soldiers who refused to go on a mission to deliver contaminated gasoline because the vehicles had almost no armor on them whatsoever.
What is truly amazing to me is that Kubrick was able to make a movie about massive military injustice and still make the audience laugh at certain times. The cockroach scene, for example, is wonderful comic relief. You get a good laugh without losing sight of the drama and the importance of the rest of the film.
It is not uncommon to read that this is the greatest anti-war film of all time, and while there are other anti-war films that I think rank right up there with Paths of Glory, this certainly is one of the greatest ever made.