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1 CuriousLurker  Oct 21, 2014 9:48:42am

Excellent review. I’m not big on war movies—in fact the last one I saw was Saving Private Ryan—but now I want to see this one whenever it comes out on DVD. Thanks.

2 lostlakehiker  Oct 21, 2014 10:51:59am

There was a real tank raid behind enemy lines in the closing days of WW2. Patton ordered it. The raiders drove right through a German-held village, courtesy of a sudden time-on-target artillery barrage. Before the defenders had a chance to dust themselves off and look around, the column was heading away down the road.

They struck deep behind the lines, shot up some trains, and temporarily liberated a POW camp. They then fought their way back to Allied lines, covered in glory.

Well, not quite. They were harried and hemmed in, and laagered for the night on a convenient hill. That turned out to have been a mistake, because the hill was a German firing range, where tank gunners practiced. The Germans had the range perfectly for every little feature on the hillside, and the column was shot to shreds and most of its people killed or captured.

The SS were baddies, for sure. But they weren’t pushover baddies. Not one tank, and not twenty, were going to pull off in 1945 the equivalent of “ride through the Sioux Nation with 50 men”, as a misguided Colonel Fetterman once boasted he could. (He is now remembered for the “Fetterman massacre”…his entire command was wiped out by hostile Indians. And they didn’t even seem to have had a hard time doing it.)

The right way to go about war is to send men to do mens’ jobs, and that means numerical superiority, especially if the other side is in any other respect superior. [Say, better tanks and more experience.] Grant and Sherman had it figured.

3 Aunty Entity Dragon  Oct 21, 2014 2:51:59pm

My review and conversation with Flick Filosopher Maryann Johanson is here:

Hmm. The historical/technical spects of the film were quite good. I was a little curious that the unit had mixed model M4 Shermans (I imagine it is next to impossible to get 4 or 5 working M4A3E8 “Easy 8” Shermans anywhere in the world, so I guess they had to throw several different Sherman models together). The tanks carried unhitching beams on the sides as they would have in real life. ‘Wardaddy’ had a captured German STG-44 German assault rifle which was a nice touch. American attitudes towards Waffen SS were accurate.

Nice to see an actual working real Tiger tank (#131 was used in the film and it saw combat in Tunisa before it was knocked out by a British Churchill tank and captured and repaired. It was restored to running condition a couple years ago)

The profanity was excessive even for US Army standards (and that takes some real effort!). Then again, I was in army aviation and not a treadhead…but the language was over the top.

The combat scenes were very well executed and generally believable even if they were familiar to anybody who has seen “Saving Private Ryan” or the Bogart classic “Sahara”. We have all seen the “tiny unit must hold this position at all costs!” bit before, but it was fairly well done.

Aaaaand…spoilers…

…spoilers…

The scene in the apartment with the two German women just about ruined the movie for me. It was wrong headed in every way possible, and I regretted taking my 14 year old kid because of it. It really bordered on rape (can you tell me it isn’t coercive when the guys in your house have submachine guns??!) and it did nothing to clarify any of the characters involved. Perhaps that is what the director intended. Heck, everything else in the movie is muddy so make the character motivations muddy and indiscernable as well. You can argue that real life is like that…but that doesn’t always work so well in a film.

Anyways…it did not work for me. It contributed nothing to the movie and detracted a great deal. If you want to deal with sexual mores in war, then build a movie around that theme. Throwing it into the 2nd act of a movie where it doesn’t tie into anything else that happened before or after made no sense…but made me dislike the characters and care a great deal less about what happens to them down the line.
In other scenes, we see ‘Wardaddy’ summarily executing a helpless and pleading German soldier to make make an impression on his reluctant bow gunner as well as gunning down a Waffen SS officer. Is ‘Wardaddy’ heroic or a psychopath? Both? The one scene where he guns down a villainous SS officer in the town square (who had hanged German children who did not want to fight) sufficed to estabish moral complexity and willingness to be brutal, but we got sooo much more in brutality. Again, I ended up not really caring about what happened to him by the end. If nihilism is the point…IE staring into the abyss of war does really bad things to you…then the 3rd act takes it all apart and goes back into the heroic last stand fight. It felt like three different movies were all together in one script and nobody knew what kind of war movie they were making: 1. Grim Dark war flick (for all you warhammer 40K fans out there…), 2. US soldiers are the real war criminals war flick (see Vietnam set “Casualties of War” with Sean Penn) or 3. Heroic Last Stand war flick (too many others to count)
I have no idea which one it was…if any.

4 SteveMcGazi  Oct 21, 2014 9:57:08pm

re: #3 Aunty Entity Dragon

Just to address a detail, due to numerous casualties and replacements, many units had a mix of vehicles.

5 Aunty Entity Dragon  Oct 21, 2014 11:31:48pm

re: #4 SteveMcGazi

Just to address a detail, due to numerous casualties and replacements, many units had a mix of vehicles.

True, and the point was adressed somewhat in that the platoon was a rump leftover from several different units. However, I believe a couple of the Shermans were early M4A2 or A3 models with the 75mm gun instead of the high velocity 76mm that the Easy 8 had. I may be wrong on that and I would need to look at the film on DVD where I could stop and look for differences in the suspension etc for definitive ID.

In any event, you would not want to have Shermans with different armament requirements if you could avoid it, and at that late point in the war, early model Shermans were being phased out or were already gone.

Of course, the film makers were trying to avoid having CGI Shermans so I understand that it would be next to impossible to have a platoon of same model Shermans unless you were in Israel (where you would be stuck with post war model M50 and M51 Shermans that look nothing like a WW II Sherman)

6 Not Approved By The MPAA  Oct 22, 2014 1:12:34am

re: #3 Aunty Entity Dragon

I would argue that the scene in the apartment with the German women provided needed insight into the tank crew, especially the two leads, Pitt and Lerman. Crucially, through the external conflicts in the story, in this scene, offered by the civilian women, the tension between such a close knit group of men who have faced death and the very real possibility that any given breath could be their last, the unspoken issues between them and the war, itself, allowed a glimpse at the internal conflict of the characters as well. We saw the horrendous burns on Pitt’s back, which are never spoken of directly — and — we were witness to a very insightful monologue from Michael Pena’s character which resulted in a slight, but very revealing crack in Pitt’s demeanor. It was a crucial bit of character development that was far more skillful and subtle than anything else in the film and it perfectly set up exactly why Pitt’s “Wardaddy” makes the choice to fight it out at the end. I would also argue that the last act had zero to do with an heroic last stand. It was far more about the man doing what he set out to do from all of the events that occurred prior to frame one of the film. All of it and all of his actions, those you would deem psychopathic, were pretty much presented on screen as a culmination of all he experienced. He had a line of dialog with Lerman where he mentioned that the war would end soon, but, “Before that happens, a lot more people gotta die.”. He was there to kill and he made no apologies for that fact. There were no ruminations or regrets. It was simply a stated fact. Does it make it heavy-handed? Sure. But, I found it to be an interesting choice that Ayer did not try to drown his movie, nor his lead, in the moral quandaries that are rote for such films. He did not ask, nor imply, that the viewer should have any sympathy for “Wardaddy” or his crew, he simply set out to tell the story he wanted to tell — and he did a fine job of it. James Gandolfini once said of his Tony Soprano character that you didn’t have to like him, you just had to understand him. I had no qualms understanding the rationale and the portrayal of the character and the choices he made.

7 Aunty Entity Dragon  Oct 22, 2014 8:56:53am

re: #6 Not Approved By The MPAA

I did not come away with a real understanding of the character. Sorry, but first he’s there to KILLL KILL KILL and then, inexplicably, he’s going to play house with couple of normal people and get the kid laid whether the girl really wants to screw Norman or not(?!) And this after she met him at gunpoint 10 minutes earlier? All of a sudden we are at Heroic Last Stand…and even if Wardaddy is a nihilistic burnout, the crew decides to do the Last Stand thing because we are a family…total cliche, and it tends to obliterate whatever development went on before…and that was muddy at best.

So, if Wardaddy s the psycho berserker he seems to be when he executes a hapless POW to make a point to Norman (that scene alone deeply strained credulity. Saving Private Ryan gave far more realistic depictions of how American soldiers would kill prisoners after a hard fought battle), then what is up with burnout Wardaddy who wants to leave it all behind and have dinner and conversation with a couple of civilians? Then, the implied sex between Norman and the girl is deeply problematic (Rapey! But not to worry…Wardaddy is there to assure us that everything is okay because “They are young and alive!” even if you were pointing an automatic weapon at both women just a few minutes before and then basically ordered Norman to shag her in the next room…)

If you are going to make a point about how some GI’s act around enemy civilians after a battle…DO NOT sugarcoat it with a bullshit line like that and try to excuse it. That was utterly unforgivable.

Whatever. I was not at all happy with this movie.

8 Not Approved By The MPAA  Oct 22, 2014 2:18:15pm

re: #7 Aunty Entity Dragon

Do keep in mind that I am not trying to change your opinion or criticisms. The beauty of film (like all creative endeavors) is that it’s subjective. You don’t like a film, that’s okay. That’s why they make so many of them. I was merely explaining that I took a whole different set of values and meanings out of the piece than did you. C’est la vie. At the end of the day, it’s just a movie.


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