But even saying that, I didn't quite believe it. Your answer will almost certainly determine your policy. The Brits offer irony and musketry, the American counter with earnestness and riflery. It goes on and on and on, for nearly three hours, epic in length but somehow not in content. This has its downside.
All troops cooperate by clearing an empty space in the middle of the long day's dying.
It's that sense of Hollywood artifice that continually robs the film of vigor and sucks the juice from what should be the world's greatest story of empowerment. Gibson melts his dead son's lead soldiers into balls for his pistols. It's not that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and the overrated director. It's that for this primal impulse to apply, you somehow have to believe. That is the sense that as brutal and violent as the course was, for these people in this time, freedom was worth dying for.