20 minutes of brilliance

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2001)

The beach scenes are absolutely fantastic, and I'm not sure if I did breathe at all during those sequences. The sound and the effects are amazing, the use of small hand cams gave the whole thing a documentary feeling of the hell that met the men who landed on the beach. Sadly after that it is not too good, and the film quickly becomes a standard Hollywood WW2 film, with heroic Americans and stupid German soldiers. A better story and less sentimentality (everyone understands that young men being blow to pieces is a tragedy and this need not be pointed out by the director. The price for freedom is high)would have given this film a 10/10. I think the men who laid down their lives on the beaches in the fight to free Europe deserves more than this.