Review of Fog in August

I'm going to start this by making a somewhat weird statement: this movie would have been much better should the developers had decided to make it a thriller and not a war drama! Let me explain myself. It seems to me that some movie makers think that if they take an interesting real world event and make it into a movie, then the movie will automatically become good, but that's far from the truth. Here, we have the Germans, during World War 2, killing off anyone who is deemed unworthy for their perfect society and their rationale behind this idea. Surely this is indeed an interesting concept, right? Mind you, however, that this is a war drama film which means that it needs to explore this concept through dramatic conflicts. This is where the movie fails to succeed, mainly because of its characters, especially the kids. First of all, Ernst, the protagonist, is a completely uninteresting and boring character whose only trait is to be brave from time to time and the same goes for his female friend (whose name i have already forgotten). The relationship they share is rushly developed, equally boring and predictable. There isn't much to say about the adult characters either, as they are all pretty much one dimensional. We have the ''good Samaritan'' nurse who wants to save the children in the orphanage, the ''evil'' nurse who assists in the killing of those children (yeah, masterful antithesis right there!), a doctor who is obsessed with his ideals and a younger doctor who follows orders without saying much. Noone ever managed to create a decent drama, without having well written and interesting characters to drive the plot forward and for the ones in this story i can say i didn't give a damn whether they lived or died. Acting was decent, directing and cinematography were okay, soundtrack was absent and generally nothing left an impression. Now, there were some powerful scenes in this movie, but only in terms of their shock value and, in the end, that's the only thing this movie manages to do with its concept: shock value. That's why i said it would have been better off if it was a thriller. I mean, come on! A dark orphanage, doctors doing questionable things to their patients in secret, that's pure thriller material!! In all honesty now, if you want a trully good war drama movie that contains the horrors that occured during World War 2, watch the Schindler's List, it's much better.