Monuments Men: A Five star casting hinders the plot

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2015)

*****Spoiler ALERT*****
The Monuments Men is a World War II fact-based story, quite different from the World War II stories we became familiar with over the years. George Clooney is both the hero and the film maker. This movie benefits from a five star casting : Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Kate Blanchett, John Goodman and our favorite "Frenchie" Jean Dujardin and top of it, an unusual schemer plot. Eight men, at first sight anything but soldiers, are gathered to save Art. Hitler pilfered great European painted and sculpted masterpieces- all of them symbols of the very best of humanity- in order to build his own private museum. They plan to claim the pieces of art back, bring them back to their owners before Nazis burn and destroy them, out of defeated spite.
The story starts while German retreat has begun : indeed you can see no battle field scenes. So, what does keep the viewer in suspense though? With no doubt the lack of action, hinder the great and brand-new topic of the epic art stealing during war.
The main reproach that comes to my mind is that it is quite hard to distinguish the characters from the superstar casting : you can build a vague idea of the character real identity but never really disassemble it from the superstar. Furthermore, there is a lot of switching back and forth between the teams of soldiers but too little time is spent with any of them, for the characters to grow and the story to cohere.
First of all, this movie is not like a typical war movie because people fall in The Monuments Men but in awkward ways rather, we are miles away from bloody scenes : fond of warlike movies, do not move forward, Monuments men is not for you ! Secondly, the vision of soldiers this movie gives us is also different. The soldiers are not traumatized, as not involved in the war extreme violence. This is what Clooney points out- still with the corners of his mouth curved in a faint, derisive smile- he will come back to his routine while the Nazi general will rot in jail. Indeed, characters wonder if they can be called soldiers as they are not fighters. During the film this ambiguity is triggered by the difficulties they have to defend their cause in front of the other "genuine soldiers". Who cares about art while millions of persons are dying and villages destroyed ? Hence the answer of this philosophical question: if you destroy art you destroy memory that comes along with it. Nazis did not put up by destroying life but any drafts of humanity achievements they were willing to exterminate. That is what those soldiers fight for. Obviously, Americans cannot escape the traditional role of Humanity saviors. This thoughtlessly tricky subject can lead us to consider this movie as naive , but on a second thought, is this not this specific same thoughtlessness that differentiate Monuments men from what we do expect of a war movie ? As I saw this movie I did not imagine that this dramatic ambition would sound so familiar