The level to which this films dumbs down the horrors of war in order to make the film fit within the PG-13 rating bracket is genuinely offensive. Right from the off when it shows two French men being executed with the bullets hitting the walls behind them without leaving a scratch on either their clothes or bodies it is clear the film takes this ridiculous stance of censorship.
War films should show war for how genuinely horrific it actually is. You can't have people just falling over without a drop of blood when they get shot or the crew of a tank crawling out with just superficial blackening after a frag grenade goes off inside the vehicle. It is just pathetic and in really bad taste.
It becomes even weirder when the film will happily show someone brutally beating a man to death with his bare fists and has the main characters bleeding out and dying long and drawn out deaths. It kind of made it feel like the German soldiers were just expendable robots and aren't even human in the eyes of the PG-13 censorship guide.
This would be excusable if the film actually had some kind of plot or direction but it really doesn't. Halfway through it goes wildly off the rails with a pointless shooting contest and lengthy scene of characters talking about home and blah blah cliché cliché. It was clear very quickly that the two soldiers in the jeep were Germans in disguise yet no one picked up on this until way into their boring conversation. I gave up when they decided to pointlessly attack a vastly superior German force with a tank and half track. The scene seemed to exist solely to facilitate the deaths of all but the two main characters and everyone just kind of went along with the ridiculous plan. The French Resistance were guerrilla fighters known for sabotage - not for standing on a hill out in the open firing at a tank and twenty odd Germans. It's like they all have a death wish or something.
I skipped through the rest of the film after that and saw that it just looked very boring and contrived anyway. Oh and even with my basic French I could tell that the English subtitles were very flimsy and gist like translations which often missed out a lot of detail. I guess that matched the dull script though.
An entirely pointless film.
War films should show war for how genuinely horrific it actually is. You can't have people just falling over without a drop of blood when they get shot or the crew of a tank crawling out with just superficial blackening after a frag grenade goes off inside the vehicle. It is just pathetic and in really bad taste.
It becomes even weirder when the film will happily show someone brutally beating a man to death with his bare fists and has the main characters bleeding out and dying long and drawn out deaths. It kind of made it feel like the German soldiers were just expendable robots and aren't even human in the eyes of the PG-13 censorship guide.
This would be excusable if the film actually had some kind of plot or direction but it really doesn't. Halfway through it goes wildly off the rails with a pointless shooting contest and lengthy scene of characters talking about home and blah blah cliché cliché. It was clear very quickly that the two soldiers in the jeep were Germans in disguise yet no one picked up on this until way into their boring conversation. I gave up when they decided to pointlessly attack a vastly superior German force with a tank and half track. The scene seemed to exist solely to facilitate the deaths of all but the two main characters and everyone just kind of went along with the ridiculous plan. The French Resistance were guerrilla fighters known for sabotage - not for standing on a hill out in the open firing at a tank and twenty odd Germans. It's like they all have a death wish or something.
I skipped through the rest of the film after that and saw that it just looked very boring and contrived anyway. Oh and even with my basic French I could tell that the English subtitles were very flimsy and gist like translations which often missed out a lot of detail. I guess that matched the dull script though.
An entirely pointless film.