World War One was an exceptionally brutal conflict; what seems most incomprehensible to us today is the way that the generals kept sending young men over the top to be mown down by machine guns, even as the evidence accumulated that this tactic simply didn't work: it wasn't that victory came at a high price, but that lives were wasted with no chance of success. Peter Weir's film 'Gallipoli' tells the story of a pair of Australian sprinters who sign up to fight in the trenches: there's a lengthy study of their lives, in Australia and in training, before the inevitable brutal ending. There's a certain amount of anti-English sentiment in the movie (brave Aussie kids being effectively murdered by the heartless colonial power), and a classical soundtrack (Albinoni) that doesn't exactly add to the film's subtlety. But the conclusion is still heart-rending, made even more tragic by the knowledge that the story told here is just a microcosm for four long years of Europe-wide carnage.
Review of Gallipoli
