disgustingly sentimental Americano tosh, but I liked it once...

Rating: 1/10 (8 June 2004)

call me cynical, or perhaps heartless, but on second viewing of this overrated film I saw straight through it. When I first saw it I was 13 years old. I was angry and angst ridden, and utterly impressionable. The film affected me. It made me rant for weeks about what evil "ba*****s" the French must have been during the war, and resent my French and German lessons. I didn't question it because before then I hadn't even seen a movie that reached the standards of The Shawshank Redemption, not that this is a bad film, on the contrary, it is beautiful and fantastic, but the point remains that I was decidedly naive when I saw it.
Fortunately, I have seen the light. I am now a film studies student and I have fallen in love with movies that make this one look, well, empty. It's nothing, really, to be honest, that Stanley Kubrick didn't do better in Full Metal Jacket. Ok, I admit that the first scene is well choreographed, well photographed, well conceived and genuinely moving. However, it seems to me that there might have been better ways to go about it, really. Someone else would have made a hugely better job of this. And well done Spielburg for Jurassic Park but I can never forgive him for inventing the Blockbuster movie with Jaws, paving the way for big family-fun action-adventure-explosion-fests. Grrrrrrrrrr.
The film was sickeningly sentimental to the point of being really "corny", in every American sense of the world. This is accelerated by the string score, which, like in most big films that want to pull the heart strings, it tells you, TELLS YOU(!), exactly when you should be feeling sad. EUGH! And what exactly is with the American flag filling the screen whilst blowing in the breeze and fading to the D-Day landings? This is such a blatant and screaming use of patriotic symbolism, it doesn't make me proud, it doesn't make me relate to the story, it doesn't do anything but make me puke. Seriously.
Don't eat me. I love you really.