Impressive for its budget

Rating: 6/10 (31 March 2006)

I could not believe this was made for under a million dollars. A good group of actors who aren't all preening pretty boys and who certainly have a degree of on-screen chemistry. Perhaps the most interesting aspect to this film is the depiction of the Malmedy 'massacre'. This scene has been done before, most notably in 'Battle of the Bulge' where the Germans basically are depicted rounding up the American PoWs, trucking in heavy MGs and mowing nearly all of them down. In S and S, the writers/director portray it as a confused situation where by a bungled escape attempt by one of US troops leads to panic on both sides. When the guard searches the prisoners before the killing, he respects 'Deacon's' bible and picture of his wife and lets him keep them. Hollywood doesn't do things like that. A Hollywood production would have shown the German ripping up the bible and rifle butting the American! So the film's depiction of this scene I believe is more accurate historically in that it was a combination of unfortunate events rather than 'zee evil Nazis lining up zee innocent Americans and firing'.
Although I found the religious theme/debate to it quite interesting, there were some very clichéd moments. It's been mentioned by other posters the Allies killing 30-odd Germans before losing one of their own. I think that the producers/director/writers wanted to 'make up' for the numbers of Americans killed in the 'massacre' scene, which does tend to happen in US war films quite often. It's sort of a 'revenge' thing which just makes the film seem more unrealistic, even though it claims it's 'based on true events'. And how come in modern war films there's good Germans and bad Germans but there's never any bad Americans?? The US forces committed many atrocities against German troops as well but these are never shown on film. Anyway, these are just some criticisms of what overall is a good film. Some have compared it to 'a Midnight Clear' which is fair in some ways but in other ways S and S is superior. Better direction, better shots, better script (though not necessarily better acting I believe) make it a more watchable affair compared to Midnight Clear. Even though the film obviously has big Mormon backing, their beliefs are never even mentioned (apart from the title maybe?) which again impressed me.