I just finished watching this movie with my family and I am legitimately angry at it. A good chunk of it takes place in the officer's mess over dinners, over the course of four days, and I have to say, they are oddly well supplied for the front lines when it comes to the brass stuffing their faces, but that can be forgiven if not for the fact that 90% of it are the soldiers and officers talking about how awful the war is. I could go with that had the movie shown us how it was hell and not told us. The only real action that takes place is a daytime raid on the enemy trenches which is done with shaky cam, a cardinal sin of movie shooting, and only lasts a few minutes. A group of British soldiers running headlong into German machine gun fire with only a few smoke shells and prayers on their lips for protection ends about as well as you'd expect it to, but it is shot so badly that you can barely see what is going on, which way the soldiers are running, who just got shot full of so many bullets that we're going to address him as "Your holeyness" from then on, etc. Only in modern film making would directors go so far out of their way to make a film's one action sequence WORSE.
I'm not sorry for any spoilers because the only way someone should be forced to suffer through this movie is as a sleep aid. The biggest offense of this experience was at the end of the movie where the big German Spring Offensive, the thing that everyone was anticipating and building up to... is told through an overhead shot of the overrun British lines and 4 lines of text. SHOW, DON'T TELL. And after those four lines fade to black, it immediately skips to credits. Like the men involved in writing and shooting this are proud of what they did, instead of being put on a fated blacklist to never watch any of their work again. I am thoroughly shocked that this dreck had received such favorable reviews and I can only assume mass quantities of bribes, drugs and/or alcohol were involved in the writing thereof. I am left with one angry statement to Hollywood.
STOP. MAKING. MOVIES. LIKE. THIS.
I'm not sorry for any spoilers because the only way someone should be forced to suffer through this movie is as a sleep aid. The biggest offense of this experience was at the end of the movie where the big German Spring Offensive, the thing that everyone was anticipating and building up to... is told through an overhead shot of the overrun British lines and 4 lines of text. SHOW, DON'T TELL. And after those four lines fade to black, it immediately skips to credits. Like the men involved in writing and shooting this are proud of what they did, instead of being put on a fated blacklist to never watch any of their work again. I am thoroughly shocked that this dreck had received such favorable reviews and I can only assume mass quantities of bribes, drugs and/or alcohol were involved in the writing thereof. I am left with one angry statement to Hollywood.
STOP. MAKING. MOVIES. LIKE. THIS.