Good Anti-War Fare

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2003)

A suicide assault that fails miserably in the trench combat of World War I, leads to the unjust court martial of 3 soldiers, who if found guilty are to be made examples and executed for cowardice.
The brilliance of this film clearly is in the camerawork. It can't be beat. I can't decide however, whether I love the story, or hate it. The clash of the old and modern world is really what the Great War was fought over, or better put what prompted its outbreak. You have the old guard in the film, the 2 elderly generals, representing the 19th century remnants of the Napoleonic age, clashing with ideals of 20th century modern man, Kirk Douglas. And I do believe to a certain extent struggles like this were commonplace during this tumultuous period of history. But in the film, they were both ends overly caricatured if not satirized. Douglas's character seems, anachronistically speaking, out of place, more so than the old guard. Almost as if he's a lost time traveler trying to reason concepts that those inhabiting the time he is visiting have no possible way of yet comprehending. Representation of fact, probably not, but it is well written and extremely well acted. Even Douglas is outstanding. For the overwhelmingly positive hype it receives, I was somewhat surprised and decidedly letdown by its transformation from a combat action film into a courtroom drama. Not that it's slow, but I was totally eating up the action and was left wanting more. I still have to put All Quiet ahead of this, since it sticks to the facts and reports the action rather than passes judgment over war, by injecting a fictitious criminal justice proceeding, and making the good guys so to speak, the bad. We don't exactly need this to know that War is preventable calamity. The action, if done well enough, which it was here, will invariably slam that message home with authority. I'm afraid that in the end, this film leaves an after taste of rather naive and rather outdated idealism. But its quality, and worth a watch.