Avoid the movie, read the book.

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2006)

A viewer needs more than patience to sit through this tripe. The story is confused, the structure chaotic, the makeup ridiculous, and the photography poor.
An early scene in a troop-train appears to have no connection with anything that follows, except that it introduces a nurse, who is unidentifiable when she turns up shortly afterwards, because of the fact that (like many of the other characters) she is first shown some distance from the camera, in poor lighting. The identity-obscuring army dress doesn't help.
This ignorance of the basics of film-making is again evident when Kristin Scott-Thomas and Colin Firth appear. We see them near a plane some distance away, then when they come closer they are back-lit so that the viewer can't see their faces.
As I hadn't read the novel, it took me half the movie to realize that I was watching a series of flashbacks rather than, as I thought, mere switches of location. Part of the reason for this was that I was unable to identify the actor playing the English patient. The makeup was so extreme that the part could just as well have been played by Lon Chaney Junior or Boris Karloff.
A similar problem was evident in the scenes showing the pilot and his passenger. Presumably nobody on the makeup team had ever seen a dead body. Believe me, corpses do not look as if they have just come out of a beauty salon!
The plane was supposedly flying in a straight line, yet the position of the sun in several shots indicated that it was flying in various different directions.
To sum up, this movie was mess. Why it was praised by the critics is one of life's mysteries.