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WW2 - World War II

TM2YC

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Black Book (2006)
My impression of Paul Verhoeven's 'Black Book' was that it got very mixed reviews when it came out but now I read that in the Netherlands it was also voted the greatest Dutch film ever made. It is a terrific WWII spy thriller, that at first appears to be following familiar patterns but becomes increasingly interesting and surprising. You might think you know who the bad guys are and who are the good guys, what is right and what is wrong but there is a whole lot of grey. Some of the occupying Germans aren't evil, just because somebody is "collaborating" doesn't mean they won't step up when it counts, some of the Dutch resistance aren't noble heroes and our Jewish heroine, Dutch resistance agent Rachel Stein, encounters anti-Semitism and barbarism from both groups. Star Carice van Houten is fantastic in a no holds bared performance. What might put some people off is the tone. You've got a cerebral investigation of morality in war time and grim depictions of the Holocaust, in the same movie as oodles of full-frontal sexualised nudity (including a pubic hair dying scene), action-packed Hollywood gun battles and Tarantino-type splatter gore. It's Paul Verhoeven after all and the tone didn't put me off but I did notice it.

 

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^Agreed, Black Book is super fun! And, did you spot its (very minor) Mummy Returns connection? :D


The Cruel Sea (1953)

330px-The_Cruel_Sea_Film_Poster.jpg


Okay, so as a WWII film buff and US Navy veteran, I finally saw The Cruel Sea, and it's... fine. On the plus side, Jack Hawkins, also from Bridge on the River Kwai, is an excellent lead, and nearly everything feels incredibly authentic, as one would hope from a movie filmed less than a decade after the fact. There are certainly some great scenes and sequences here and there.

The trouble lies in the fact that the movie is more of a collection of scenes than a single, tightly told story. (I had a similar reaction to Greyhound, although that action-packed flick takes place over a single Atlantic crossing, while this film takes place over several years.) While land-based war films can easily focus on a single mission or battle, naval films seem to have a tougher time telling self-contained stories, no doubt because the enemies are usually unseen, and the process of fighting is all about the mechanics of the ships and weaponry, without much space for individual heroism. A miniseries format, where we really get to know the characters, would probably be ideal for the naval setting, in which battle sequences here and there wouldn't dominate the proceedings as they tend to do in features. I haven't seen Das Boot (in any version), so I guess my favorite modern naval history film remains K-19: The Widowmaker. At 126 minutes, The Cruel Sea is a bit of a slog, but it's certainly an important film worth remembering and preserving.

Grade: B
 

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Went the Day Well? (1942)
It's an intriguing experience watching this critically respected British WW2 propaganda film for the first time, so soon after Paul Verhoeven's 'Starship Troopers'. It's got some of the same recognisable propaganda tropes (albeit on a much smaller, black and white, quaintly English scale). A platoon of German paratroopers arrive in a stereotypical English country village posing as British soldiers but their disguise eventually slips. The plucky villagers volunteer to die in super-violent ways (for an early 40s film), being run through with bayonets, mowed down by machine gun fire on camera, or knifed in the back. Death or injury is a glorious sacrifice shared by man and woman, policeman and poacher, the elderly and children, working-class and upper-class. The sturdy Lady of the Manor is shown throwing herself onto a grenade to save the village children, land-girls are shown wielding the Tommy-guns alongside the soldiers in the final siege and a woman whose sweetheart is found to be a traitor summarily executes him with a pistol. Hurrah! The only person trying to stop the villagers getting themselves killed, by counselling them to exercise caution, pointing out the danger and advocating waiting for help to arrive, is the secret Nazi agent. A key message is "eternal vigilance" as we witness several missed opportunities to see though the German deception (e.g. one of them not knowing there is a Piccadilly station in Manchester, as well as in London) because the villagers aren't paranoid enough. The villagers are often able to turn the tables on their well armed opponents because the Germans are depicted as being drunk on duty and lacking in discipline, as well as being totally amoral. The tension is terrifically sustained, as we the audience know who the soldiers really are from the start, plus know who the "fifth columnist" is, to whom the poor villagers are still confiding in right up to the finale. It's an interesting touch to have the narrator-to-camera begin and end the story looking backwards from the future perspective of having already defeated Hitler, when this was filmed 2.5-years before that actually happened in real life. Presenting victory to it's intended audience as a reassuring inevitable "fact".

 

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Munich: The Edge of War (2021)
An average "TV movie" that can't be rescued by the usually reliable George MacKay and a superb Jeremy Irons as a very convincing Neville Chamberlain. I'm a big fan of Robert Harris' meticulously researched historical novels but I've not read 'Munich' yet, so I can only assume the deficiencies of this movie are down to the adaptation from page, to screen. I find it hard to believe that unlikely moments like a German officer taking it into his own hands to beat up and spit on the UK PM's private secretary in the middle of a tense treaty negotiation were Harris' ideas. Anachronistic details, shaky-cam and chaotic editing are distracting. I was very impressed by co-lead Jannis Niewöhner, who is an established German actor but who was new to me.


Munich: The Edge of War (2021, Netflix)

Munich_edge_of_war_poster.jpg


Well, maybe I'm just a sucker for the genre, because I found this movie edge-of-your-seat compelling. Granted, Ulrich Matthes, who unforgettably played Goebbels in Downfall, doesn't look like Hitler at all, but once I got past that bit of weirdness, I was entirely engrossed, and, unlike with The King's Choice, I barely even noticed the occasional shaky cam. (Well, one more weird point: two characters are supposed to be former school chums, but are portrayed by actors born a generation apart.) It was great seeing Babylon Berlin's Liv Lisa Fries pop up, and I'm pretty sure I recognized several filming locations from that show, too. George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner, and Jeremy Irons are all excellent, and by the end, I was in high suspense over how the movie might end even with the obvious historical fixed points at play. A Metacritic score of 53 is far too low for a historical thriller this solid.

Grade: B+
 

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Operation Mincemeat (2021, Netflix in the US)

Operation_Mincemeat.jpg


Spring, 1943: Churchill resolves to knock Italy out of the Axis, which will necessitate an amphibious invasion. To soften enemy defenses, British Intelligence is tasked with duping Hitler and Co. into thinking Britain will start with taking the friendlier, Italy-occupied Greece first. One part of this scheme is Operation Mincemeat, in which a corpse with false documents pointing to Greece is to be nudged Germany's way.

So far, so historical. But, this is a (very long) two-hour movie, so we're treated to a rather meh romance triangle melodrama whose own deceptions and secrets mirror kinda-sorta that of the actual scheme. There's lots of talk about how "the fate of the world hangs in the balance" of these events, which, while not entirely untrue, is still a pretty obvious exaggeration. A character named Ian Fleming gets a fair amount of screen time, but doesn't really do anything, and the meatiest action of the story is told almost in montage (!). Overall, it's... fine, not insultingly awful like The Imitation Game, but nowhere near as gripping as last week's review, Munich: The Edge of War. A fan edit could cut out all the fluff, and pare it down to a reasonably entertaining ~45-minute mini-film, or an episode of an anthology "British WW2 Theatre" TV series. The flick is more likely to appeal to everyday Colin Firth fans than history buffs.

Grade: C+
 

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U-571 (2000)
I remember 'U-571' was quite controversial in the UK at the time, to the point that the then Prime Minister denounced it in Parliament. There had already been some lesser disquiet in 1998, when 'Saving Private Ryan' (a fantastic film in my opinion) portrayed an "Americans only" version of the D-Day advance. The UK has been justly proud of it's WWII code-breaking record (Bletchley Park, Alan Turing etc) and capture of an Enigma machine, ever since the top-secret files were de facto declassified and publicised in the 1970s, so some people were a bit miffed to discover it was really Matthew McConaughey and Jon Bon Jovi's band of US sailors. To be fair, 'U-571' does have a scroll right at the end, clearly listing the actual facts and dates.

Leaving all that aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It keeps building up the tension to the halfway point when our heroes board the stricken U-Boat and complete their objective, when I briefly wondered where does it go from here? But more and more tension, drama and action continues to build from there on out. The script has some great characters, well defined and motivated. I was interested in the way the film begins with McConaughey's XO being passed over for a command, but instead of his subsequent actions being about proving that decision wrong, he finds out how right it was and so humbly learns to be a leader in the heat of battle. The only thing that felt really misjudged was the jarring scene of the German Captain machine gunning some random lifeboat survivors who appear out of nowhere. The scene seems to be there just to define them as the nasty bad-guys but this was 2000, not a propaganda movie from the 40s, when one expects a little more nuance, especially as this movie is clearly in hock to the even-handed 'Das Boot'. I love a good submarine movie and 'U-571' is one of the best.

By the way, 'U-571' is the last good, A-list film which McConaughey made before spending most of his 2000s making forgettable romcoms (before the "McConaissance" from 2011 onwards). I don't know what it was about filming 'U-571' that made him want to phone it in for a decade and just count his money? He gives his all in 'U-571' at least.

 

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^^ Sounds like we are entirely on the same page about this one...

Operation Mincemeat (2021)
A decent enough WW2 spy caper, based on the real-life elaborate deception by MI5 to trick Nazi Germany into thinking the Allies would not be landing in Sicily. It's one of those hack Hollywood scripts that can't be bothered with dramatising the real odd twists and turns of an immensely dramatic real story, so plugs in a bogus love triangle, false jeopardy and fictional and/or inflated minor characters... then arranges the facts around those "story beats". Far from adding drama, I found the love triangle to actually be destructive to the success of the film. The artificial addition of this bad-blood between the two main spies, denies us the viewer of enjoying the feeling of sharing in the pair's comradery, of feeling like we are listening over their shoulders as they cook up this daring scheme. Jason Isaacs plays an annoying trope character, the hissable higher up who wants the plan to fail, because he is pathologically opposed to it and the people planning it for reasons not adequately explained (it's to add false jeopardy to the script). The film is also desperate to milk every drop out of Bond writer Ian Fleming's tangential involvement in the operation (including having him narrate the whole film from his typewriter). I was getting flashbacks to the dreadful 'The Imitation Game' but this isn't that order of bad. OM is fine, the real story is just too fascinating and the ensemble cast are too high quality for this not to be watchable, and there are enough enticing facts to make the viewer excited to read more of the true history.

 

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^^ Sounds like we are entirely on the same page about this one...

Operation Mincemeat (2021)
A decent enough WW2 spy caper, based on the real-life elaborate deception by MI5 to trick Nazi Germany into thinking the Allies would not be landing in Sicily. It's one of those hack Hollywood scripts that can't be bothered with dramatising the real odd twists and turns of an immensely dramatic real story, so plugs in a bogus love triangle, false jeopardy and fictional and/or inflated minor characters... then arranges the facts around those "story beats". Far from adding drama, I found the love triangle to actually be destructive to the success of the film. The artificial addition of this bad-blood between the two main spies, denies us the viewer of enjoying the feeling of sharing in the pair's comradery, of feeling like we are listening over their shoulders as they cook up this daring scheme. Jason Isaacs plays an annoying trope character, the hissable higher up who wants the plan to fail, because he is pathologically opposed to it and the people planning it for reasons not adequately explained (it's to add false jeopardy to the script). The film is also desperate to milk every drop out of Bond writer Ian Fleming's tangential involvement in the operation (including having him narrate the whole film from his typewriter). I was getting flashbacks to the dreadful 'The Imitation Game' but this isn't that order of bad. OM is fine, the real story is just too fascinating and the ensemble cast are too high quality for this not to be watchable, and there are enough enticing facts to make the viewer excited to read more of the true history.

Was looking forward to this film for a long time but had similar feelings when I went to see it during the theatrical release, to the extent I started making mental notes on what to edit away while watching it!

My memory is a touch hazy, but I remember thinking that it was at least better than the looser adaptation "The Man Who Never Was" from 1965, though I only saw the older film once a few years ago so it's hard to be certain.
 

ParanoidAndroid

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^^ Sounds like we are entirely on the same page about this one...

Operation Mincemeat (2021)
A decent enough WW2 spy caper, based on the real-life elaborate deception by MI5 to trick Nazi Germany into thinking the Allies would not be landing in Sicily. It's one of those hack Hollywood scripts that can't be bothered with dramatising the real odd twists and turns of an immensely dramatic real story, so plugs in a bogus love triangle, false jeopardy and fictional and/or inflated minor characters... then arranges the facts around those "story beats". Far from adding drama, I found the love triangle to actually be destructive to the success of the film. The artificial addition of this bad-blood between the two main spies, denies us the viewer of enjoying the feeling of sharing in the pair's comradery, of feeling like we are listening over their shoulders as they cook up this daring scheme. Jason Isaacs plays an annoying trope character, the hissable higher up who wants the plan to fail, because he is pathologically opposed to it and the people planning it for reasons not adequately explained (it's to add false jeopardy to the script). The film is also desperate to milk every drop out of Bond writer Ian Fleming's tangential involvement in the operation (including having him narrate the whole film from his typewriter). I was getting flashbacks to the dreadful 'The Imitation Game' but this isn't that order of bad. OM is fine, the real story is just too fascinating and the ensemble cast are too high quality for this not to be watchable, and there are enough enticing facts to make the viewer excited to read more of the true history.

Never seen "The Imitation Game" but can report that going to Bletchley Park before and after the film was released made for very different experiences, the best way I can describe it is that the place went from being quite low-key to more (for lack of a better phrase) "visitor friendly".

Going around the first time was almost (barring the displays) like stepping back seventy years, whereas the next felt more like going to a museum, probably not helped by the greater number of visitors (a surprise?).

I have some slight involvement with heritage preservation and outreach so cannot begrudge them any newfound interest and necessary accomodation of it, but I do distinctly remember missing what had been (or not been) there before.
 

TM2YC

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^ That reminds me of some of the good writing that there was in 'Operation Mincemeat', in the short scene where they draught in a couple of girls from Bletchley Park and mention "the 20 committee" to them and in a second they go "Oh 20... like Roman numerals... XX... the double-cross committee... hee hee" and Wilton's character looks back at them "er, yes".
 

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Dunkirk (2017)
Like with 'Interstellar', I originally made a special trip to see 'Dunkirk' on the biggest & loudest IMAX screen available in 70mm 1.43:1. So I wondered if the experience would match up on the smaller screen, cropped to 2.20:1 on blu-ray. 'Interstellar' was just as powerful but I felt 'Dunkirk' lacked a little something that the vertical scale provided. I'm always been in two minds about the non-linear way the story is told. The story is close enough to a linear one that it can feel superfluous. Would it really change the film so much if we were watching the action on the beach, the boat and the plane on the same day? However, I was appreciating it's use much more this time. It adds to the "fog of war" sensation when we get a little confused (intentionally I think) between which boat is which and which plane is which and the bit where the hand wave from the downed Spitfire is misread from two angles is dramatic genius, that only this structure can provide. Plus hats off to the bit where two of the timelines intersect in the script at precisely the right point for one to serve as a natural "flashback" for the other. The majestic ending gets me every time, as Tom Hardy is silhouetted against his burning Spitfire, like a symbolic Viking longboat, while Hans Zimmer's version of Elgar's 'Nimrod' plays. The film's young star Fionn Whitehead deserves some more roles on this level. Because Christopher Nolan re-uses a "stock company" of his favourite actors a lot (like many directors), I'd not noticed before that despite this, he has never used the same lead actor (The Dark Knight trilogy not included for obvious reasons). I wonder if this is by an accident of scheduling, or a deliberate choice to give each film a different "voice".


The Making of Dunkirk (2017)
I wish this subdivided making-of had been only 90-minutes, the extra 16-minutes could've been saved by removing the short breaks between chapters and by cutting every time somebody said the words "for real" and "IMAX/70mm/large-format". I could also have done with more behind the scenes material about prop fabrication and some of the main cast are not interviewed at all. I loved the details about the simple old-fashioned in-camera "movie magic" tricks like using basically cardboard cutouts for crowd scenes.
 

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The Good German (2006)
Steven Soderbergh
stirs a terrific 50/50 mix of the 1940s Noir thrillers 'Casablanca' and 'The Third Man'. The former for it's inversion of the moral trajectory (plus the poster homage) and the bomb wrecked, politically divided, post-war city setting. The pleasingly convoluted Cold War espionage plot kept me gripped but it's the style that makes 'The Good German' unique. In one of Soderbergh's technical experiments, he films this almost exactly as if it was a 1940s film, one that we can imagine has been sitting in a vault for 60-years. So black & white, 4:3, super high-contrast Noir shadows, dissolves, wipes, iris ins/outs, 1940s shot compositions and editing techniques, deliberately artificial looking front projection and painted back drops, plus real stock footage of post-war Berlin is blended in with the new footage. It's a stunning effect but Soderbergh drops in modern levels of sex, violence and bad language, which I felt sometimes pulled me out of that old-fashioned illusion. The cynical line towards the end "You've been wrong every step of the way Jake... why stop now?" stood out, echoing "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown". George Clooney sports a large bandage over his cut ear for much of the movie which must be a homage to Jack Nicholson's nose in 'Chinatown'. By the way, I believe not all versions of the 'The Good German' are in 4:3, so you'd definitely want to make sure you watched it that way, for the full retro impact.

 

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The Bridge on the River Kwai is a must-watch classic of not only WWII films, but cinema in general. However, the last act could use a bit of tightening. Several scenes of whacking through the jungle, floating down a river, and mining the titular bridge could use some trimming. Sure, the deliberate pacing is part of the charm, but even so, there's at least five minutes of flab in this three-hour epic.
hopefully someone makes a good fan-edit of it to maybe trim it down and tighten the pacing a little bit
 

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d2ea7b86-ab96-11ed-9d05-02420a000198.webp


Memphis Belle (1990)
One of my favourite films when I was a lad. In 1991/1992, my friends and I were playing a lot of LucasArts' B17s-vs-Messerschmitts WWII game 'Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe', so 'Memphis Belle' hit video stores and TV at just the right time. I made a B-17 model kit at the time as well. When I later watched things like 'Pulp Fiction', 'Titanic', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Lord of the Rings', I was thinking "Hey it's my boys from Memphis Belle!".

It surprises me that MB doesn't get talked about as one of "the great war movies". Maybe it's because it's not dark and cynical, it's heroic and action-packed and all about it's characters, with no greater discussion of political context. It never shows, or tells you anything about the war outside of the experience of the 10 young men and how it changes each of them. It's never explained why they need to go on the specific mission, it never cuts to events elsewhere in the conflict and you don't see the enemy leaders, or the allied leaders either. The true story basis is fictionalised to the point of being practically pure fiction, which I think is a respectable approach, if you don't want to go entirely in the opposite direction. George Fenton's 'Gone With the Wind' style score is utterly magnificent, and the model work is some of the best ever achieved, to the point where you maybe aren't impressed because you just assume they were shots of real aircraft. I've seen this so many times but the editing of the sequence where the crew are frantically cranking the wheel down at the last second has me on the edge of my seat every time. I still love this movie!


A (too) short video on the model work:

 

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Oppenheimer (2023)

Oppenheimer_%28film%29.jpg


No one could deny that C. Nolan is a skilled technician of film and sound. He could direct a sequence depicting a reality show cooking competition, and make it feel like a clash of Olympian gods. What's more, his celluloid photography is as eye-popping as his use of snarling and roaring muscial cues is bracing.

And yet, time and again, his storytelling and dialogue instincts make him swerve into fetid, swampy ditches. I neither can nor should ever forgive him for the exchange in Dunkirk in which one British officer peers across the Channel and muses "You can almost see it from here," to which another officer asks him what he means, as if anyone in that situation could possibly not know he meant England (or "Home," as the officer poetically sighs). Nolan is obsessed with reminding the audience how smart he is, but his work consistently features mind-bogglingly stupid plot points and twists. Heck, his last movie, Tenet, was nothing but mind-boggling nonsense and ersatz profundity.

Oppenheimer is better than much of his recent work, because the history is so rich that it constrains his bad instincts, but they still persist. Framing the film around Oppenheimer's security credential hearings was a perfectly fine choice, but the extended, twisty focus on Strauss' Commerce Secretary confirmation hearings add up to one big shaddy-dog story of a distraction. (So this Strauss guy was a petty man who held a grudge - so what?) We then get a useless and ridiculous History Cinematic Universe sequel tease when the unnamed Senate aide draws out JFK's name for a dramatic reveal, as if anyone even vaguely familiar with politics at the time didn't know who the celebrity war hero son of Joseph Kennedy was, and the moment is exactly as clunky as the garbage "Robin" name-drop at the end of TDKR.

Finally, Nolan closes the movie with a vision of nuclear fire burning the whole world, because of course he does, and remind us, again, what Strauss' pettiness has to do with all of that?! Sure, the revelation that Strauss had built a burning enmity over a completely imagined slight is a neat narrative reveal, but it tells us nothing about the film's central character, and I can't shake the feeling that Nolan put it there, and devoted about a third of the movie to setting it up, purely to give the audience one of his trademark "Gotcha!" moments. (If the idea was that the mere pettiness of men might lead to nuclear devastation, rather than deeply ingrained prejudices or hatreds, it certainly wasn't set up by the rest of the film.) The fact that the famously CG-averse Nolan almost finishes the movie on a CG-animated shot only underscores the extraneous nature of the Strauss subplot.

To be sure, there are solid performances throughout, and some great exchanges, especially the scenes between Oppenheimer and Groves. Alas, these moments feel like sped-up samples of longer, more detailed scenes, which are then whisked into dreary sameness by Nolan's non-linear, blender-like editing. As for the bit where Oppenheimer and Tatlock interrupt coitus for no discernible reason other than to crowbar in the famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita... it's positively embarrassing. To quote an oberservation from the YouTuber Nando, himself quoting Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, "Christopher Nolan has heard of writers who use subtext, and he thinks they're all cowards."

Grade: C+


The best scene (I got goosebumps both times) is when Oppenheimer is receiving applause for his achievement and it starts to morph into the screams of the dying.

I can't fault the scene's direction or audio artistry, but to me, it came out of nowhere, and, without any grounding in coherent character production, bordered on silliness. You can't just drop a scene that Grand-Guignol without any kind of buildup, Christopher.
 

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The World at War (1973)
I'd watched 'The World at War' on TV with my parents, sometime when it was repeated, then again when the DVD box-set came out. Then it got remastered for blu-ray in 2010 but was unwisely cropped to 16:9 but thankfully Network corrected that by putting out an uncropped blu-ray box-set in 2016, which I purchased right away... then have taken 8-years to get around to finding the time to actually watch it. It's a commitment at 22.5 hours, plus 12.5 hours of bonus documentaries, for a total of 35 hours of WW2 history. It's an impressive undertaking to try and describe the global scale of the conflict, and commendable that for a British made documentary series, it gives no more time and weight to the UK's involvement than any other theatre, the pacific, the Eastern front, or Germany's home-front suffering. Not everything can be covered, even in 26 films but an area that felt lacking (especially given their importance in the world today) was China, their involvement is mentioned several times but I could have done with a whole episode delving deeper.

That this was made in 1973 means a lot of vital first hand testimony was still available from people who were really there, on the ground and near the top of the various chains of command. On the flip side, there are absent facts we now know post 1973, like the still top secret role of codebreakers at Bletchley Park, or that Nazi architect Albert Speer, who is prominently interviewed in the series, was extensively lying about his knowledge and involvement in the holocaust. Also I noted, the series quotes the then widely accepted but vastly inflated ten-fold claims about the death toll in the Dresden bombings put about by people like the then respected but subsequently discredited anti-Semitic "historian" David Irving. Each episode is intended as a self-contained film on a specific subject but when watched all together, back-to-back, the shots of soldiers unloading and loading artillery and mortar shells becomes quite repetitive. Some of the footage of mutilated corpses (especially in the full colour American Pacific theatre) feels stronger and less censored than you'd expect in a war documentary broadcast today. The combination of the late great Carl Davis's score and powerful main theme, with Laurence Olivier's thoughtful poetic voice-over is unforgettable.



On the bonus films...

Hitler's Germany: The People's Community / Total War - 3-hour, 2-part, in-depth look at the experience of the German people, all the way through from before Hitler came to power, from early stunning victories, to total crushing final defeat. It was interesting to hear an anti-fascist student say he was actually glad to be called up to fight for Nazi Germany because it allowed him to escape the daily suffocating propaganda and oppression of being a civilian.
The Two Deaths of Adolf Hitler - Countering the popular and fanciful conspiracy theories about Hitler surviving the war, with reams of first hand testimony and archive documents.
The Final Solution - The subject of the single 'Genocide' episode is expanded to over 3-hours, allowing the viewer to go through the whole ethos of Nazi pseudoscience, and the the gradual creep across years from growing systematic oppression, to organised death machine.
Warrior - Reflections from rank and file soldiers, over appropriate archive footage, in a style much like Peter Jackson's 2018 film 'They Shall Not Grow Old'. I laughed when a soldier (who was not joking) was trying to describe what it was like becoming acclimatised to the noise, chaos and horror of battle, as like listening to his daughter's 70s music!
Secretary to Hitler - An expanded recording of the interview with Traudl Junge, whose memoir was the basis of 2004's film 'Downfall' about the final days in Hitler's bunker.
From War to Peace - Prof. Stephen E. Ambrose's interview plays in more depth, giving more of his interesting observations and conclusions about the conflict.
Making of the Series (1989) - A very old fashioned feeling piece, mostly producer Jeremy Isaacs in an armchair talking.
Making of the Series (2003) - An over indulgent 2-hour look into the making and editing of the vast series, that ironically could've done with some of the same judicious editing the interviewees are talking about.
Experiences of War - Just a compilation of off-cut interviews that are worth hearing but didn't have a place anywhere else.
 

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Pearl Harbor (2001)
Clearly modelled after film-making genius James Cameron's 1997 mega-blockbuster disaster-movie/epic-romance 'Titanic'. But that concept in the hands of Director Michael Bay and 'Braveheart' writer Randall Wallace, is like two infants who've found their artist parent's paintbox and smeared it all over the walls of their nursery. In 'Titanic' the romance is so enthralling and genuinely joyous that it scarcely matters that a ship sinks at the end. In 'Pearl Harbor' the romance is this shallow embarrassing thing that drags on and on, simply filling up the 3-hour runtime required for Bay to say he made an "epic". The bit he's actually interested in and technically competent to handle is the attack itself. It's mostly brilliantly filmed, shocking in it's scale and holds up FX wise 24-years later. The dogfights are not as well done though, they are too frenetically edited and spacially incomprehensible to be successful and are punctuated by constant annoying whoops, shouts of "Yee haa!" and a running commentary to tell you what is happening (presumably because Bay knows the viewer won't be able to follow it otherwise). They look especially poor when contrasted with how Christopher Nolan does the dogfights in 'Dunkirk' (also scored by Hans Zimmer). Shots like the intro of Kate Beckinsale's nurse are unintentionally hilarious, because it's filmed like a L'Oréal commercial. Bay's lighting is stunning as per usual, it's just a shame this isn't a silent film, so we could just look at it.


At least the movie gave us this 2004 gem:




and a classic WWII-adjacent film I re-watched (it does feature several b&w flashback scenes set in WW2):

The Odessa File (1974)
The first of an informal trio of popular Nazi-hunter thrillers made between '74 and '78, including 'Marathon Man' and 'The Boys from Brazil'. I'm not sure why they all got made in this specific period, or if the public was just mad for this stuff at that specific point for some reason? Like 'The Day of the Jackal' from the same period, this an old-fashioned espionage thriller (in a good way), where the thrills aren't from chaotic car chases and outlandish action set-pieces, they're from games of globe-trotting cat-and-mouse between the heroes and the villains. I guess it was new at the time to have a movie hero be a German of a younger post-war generation, battling and repudiating the remnants of the old Nazi generation? I'd forgotten how much of this fiction is fact based and I didn't remember the big twist at all, so it got me again! Andrew Lloyd Webber's score (I didn't know he did film scores) occasionally sounds quite dated.


^ Jon Voight's age makeup is much more successful here than the rubber Halloween mask he's wearing in Pearl Harbor :LOL: .
 
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ParanoidAndroid

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Pearl Harbor (2001)
Clearly modelled after film-making genius James Cameron's 1997 mega-blockbuster disaster-movie/epic-romance 'Titanic'. But that concept in the hands of Director Michael Bay and 'Braveheart' writer Randall Wallace, is like two infants who've found their artist parent's paintbox and smeared it all over the walls of their nursery. In 'Titanic' the romance is so enthralling and genuinely joyous that it scarcely matters that a ship sinks at the end. In 'Pearl Harbor' the romance is this shallow embarrassing thing that drags on and on, simply filling up the 3-hour runtime required for Bay to say he made an "epic". The bit he's actually interested in and technically competent to handle is the attack itself. It's mostly brilliantly filmed, shocking in it's scale and holds up FX wise 24-years later. The dogfights are not as well done though, they are too frenetically edited and spacially incomprehensible to be successful and are punctuated by constant annoying whoops, shouts of "Yee haa!" and a running commentary to tell you what is happening (presumably because Bay knows the viewer won't be able to follow it otherwise). They look especially poor when contrasted with how Christopher Nolan does the dogfights in 'Dunkirk' (also scored by Hans Zimmer). Shots like the intro of Kate Beckinsale's nurse are unintentionally hilarious, because it's filmed like a L'Oréal commercial. Bay's lighting is stunning as per usual, it's just a shame this isn't a silent film, so we could just look at it.
Never seen an official version (intentionally avoided it) but found ADigitalMan's edit perfectly watchable.


@spence did a remaster of this a little over a year ago, from an HD source with surround audio.

 

spence

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