This movie sucks!!!

Rating: 3/10 (23 May 1999)

Expecting a new "Saving Private Ryan", "Platoon", "Full Metal Jacket" or "Apocalypse Now" I went to see this movie in Tromsø, Norway. I came out of the cinema really disappointed. This movie was all a war movie should NOT be.
Sure, some of the war scenes were brilliant, but that's also all the good this movie has accomplished.
My list of complaints about this movie is quite long. First of all: those voiceovers! Whatever is the meaning of putting them there? Sure they have an important message to convey, but when they were put in as voiceovers the way they were, I almost fell to sleep during them. I think it would have been better putting the messages in as text on the screen, subtitles or scrolling text over the screen.
Then you have the music. THIS IS A WAR MOVIE! Get the point! It's NOT "Back To Howard's End" or "The Age Of Innocence"! So the music in the film is really malplaced! That's one thing. Another thing is that it's there EVERY second of the film. I can't remember ONE second without music in the movie. And that's NOT a plus for a war movie. In a war movie you need scenes without music to meditate over what you've just seen. The music is also repetitive and boring. Some places it seems to be at the end of a sequence, and then it starts repeating itself over and over again. If you didn't fall asleep during the last voiceover, you might fall to sleep during the endless repetitions of the terribly malplaced, boring and repetitive music.
Third: the actors. The men who fight in wars are your regular John Doe's such as you and me. Not your regular celebrities as George Clooney, John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte and Sean Penn. A war movie gains on using smallname actors, they give a more realistic story when the soldiers are people you don't recognize just like that. In fact this is the only bad thing I found about "Saving Private Ryan" too, they should've never used Tom Hanks in that movie.
Apart from being bigname actors, they don't do their parts too well either. This move would have gained much on using talented, yet unknown actors. Someone the public was NOT familiar with.
That's enough said about this film. In short: it has a great story and great war scenes. But it's terribly made, with wrong actors, horrible music, and voiceovers straight out of hell. And when a 3-hour movie gets this boring because of that: it sucks! 3/10 is all it gets from me... And everyone I've talked to about this movie agrees with me...