Enough of this 'it's awful/it just sucks/insult to Canada' stuff, I want to hear specific, explained reasons why it isn't good. I'd be pleased with this war movie effort. Seemed a bit better done then the Aussie 'Kokoda' from 2006 at least.
So give me reasons. REAL reasons. The only bad thing I can see is that the battle showed the Canadians defending all the time, when they really had to push forward and capture the position.
I happen to think it's a great movie. I think some of it went over some people's heads. And of course tastes do vary. I think a lot of people did like the movie - it's just that the haters are very vocal.
shareWell, I have seen hundreds of: German, French, American, etc films. This is my first Canadian made film but it is without any doubt the best film I have seen in my life. The end is heartbreaking, I watched this film with 5 friends and all 6 of us cried like hell. Paul Gross, Caroline Dhavernas and Joe Dinicol are excellent acters!!!
share" I want to hear specific, explained reasons why it isn't good."
Saw a lot of war films, and this one just choked on dick.
Man, you're so right!!!
share>>> I want to hear specific, explained reasons why it isn't good.
>> Saw a lot of war films, and this one just choked on dick.
< begin SARCASM subroutine >
Well, there's a response that I'm sure the OP thought was _exactly_ what he was looking for.
< end SARCASM >
Did you, the person who wrote that this film "choked on dick" think that was a 1) clever, 2) hip, or 3) irrefutable critique that could persuade audiences to shun this movie?
Or, as I suspect, are you one of those useless beings that cannot accomplish anything of merit yourself and try to make your damaged self feel better by disparaging the work of others?
I had not seen this film, so I checked IMDB reviews. The intelligent reviewers, who can offer reasons for their opinions, seem to think Passchendaele worthy. Your asinine comment sealed the deal; I bought the Blu-ray.
90 percent of the movie had nothing to do with the battle of Passchendaele!!
You had the entire movie just CRAWLING along in a horribly acted soap opera esque love story, that takes place in Canada, and at the very end you get a forced sex scene in a bombed out building then a short battle sequence that could have taken place in any battle occuring throughout the length of the war... 2 sides in their trenches/shell holes, rush, kill, complete.
Oh and throw in one frustratingly stupid kid (who cant act for beans.. Im convinced he had some dirt on Gross for being allowed to get the part) who whimsically gets blown onto a cross, and subsequently, every single gun (even the artillery, far in the distance) stops firing while Mr ego Paul Gross (who I do like in his previous stuff, I even enjoyed him in a live action 'Hamlet' that I attended) plays superman and carries him to safety.
So not only does most of the film have nothing to do with Passchendaele, but even the 8 minutes that do take place there are just a disappointing joke with very great special effects/costume/sets
I dont care whether or not you thought the movie as a whole was good or bad.. if the romantic love story is your cup of tea.. fine. But dont market it as, and then continue to try to pass it off as a story of the Battle of Passchendaele.
That is the beef. A supposed tribute to a certain battle, is no tribute at all, not to the battle, and not even to the First World War.
You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. Now its my turn - Frank White
maybe that whole concept was to show the exact effects the war had on those who weren't serving....it had tremendous effect on loved ones and those who were prosecuted because they were too young or unable to serve. The dynamic between the home front and front line showed that war extends past the shells and bullets and hits home. A good example is when Dunne is explaining why his mother died, when she got the message that her son was MIA and to that meant dead. She then realized she had no family left and died heartbroken. I do not think this is a story unique to this movie, i think it was a reality.
I understand why people did like the way this movie was marketed, but I'm not sure who is responsible the distribution company or the producers. That point doesn't matter, looking beyond the specific "Battle of Passenchaele" it showed that all these characters had major major revelations during that battle sequences...Sarah, David, Michael. They all found what thier "cause" was or found out exactly what war was about. I think this is key to the title of this film.
I personally loved and it changed the way i viewed Canadian Patriotism....definately, but i do acknowledge it isn't the best movie out there, but for what it stands for it ranks high on my list of favourites.
I hope that made sense.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage and make a Northwest Passage to the Sea
I'm an American who knows very little about WWI due to all the hype of WWII. However, I must point up above to and_then_some and say, yeah! What they said!
The focus was characters affected by the battle, not the battle itself. I watch movies for the entertainment and characters, I watch the History Channel for the facts.
Thankyou tblackwo and stadler-3 for actually providing good reasons- that's what I was looking for. Especially the one about everyone stopping firing including the artillery set way back behind the lines. That especially is pretty ridiculous
share"I dont care whether or not you thought the movie as a whole was good or bad.. if the romantic love story is your cup of tea.. fine. But dont market it as, and then continue to try to pass it off as a story of the Battle of Passchendaele."
Sums it up really,has little or no resemblance at all to the battle my Grandfather took part in.
I liked the battle scenes. But the rest of the film leading up to those scenes seemed like a tedious Heritage Minutes commercial. Honestly, the movie just needed a good script doctor. Had Gross gone the Band of Brothers route and focused on the men fighting in the war for the entire film, this might've been one of the greatest war/antiwar movies ever made. But so much of the film leading up to the battle scenes was so dull and the acting and dialogue were often very iffy. Too bad, because there probably won't be another big-budget war film coming out of Canada for a while after this one. The money just isn't here like it is in Hollywood...
"You can dish it out, but you got so you can't take it no more." - Caesar Enrico Bandello
[deleted]
Well, first off - he stabs a guy in the forehead with a bayonet. What the hell. And then he and everyone else are walking around being tedious, and that's when I just couldn't take any more. In short - it was Boring. I'm sure there's a good story to be told about this event, but obviously not by this director.
Had I known that it was made by and starred the Mountie from Due South, I would have dropped the Dvd instantly. Brrr.
"Are you serving that ape a Martini ?"
"Well, first off - he stabs a guy in the forehead with a bayonet. What the hell."
What the hell, you say? That was actually done by PG's grandfather, which haunted him his whole life.
Overall, I liked the movie a lot but still wished there had been more war scenes and less backstory/romance.
This isn't Hollywood. Probably, a two-hour film focused strictly on the war would have been economically prohibitive, but there are so few WWI movies out there that I don't care if there is romance in them. Waiting for "Birdsong", if that movie is made someday.
shareSeriously? If you don't know why this movie sucked, then it is not worth the time trying to explain it to you. You obviously don't have eyes, ears, or a brain. All right, I'll give you one reason: Paul Gross sucks and his lack of self awareness of his suckiness, sucks even more.
shareGross is no Stephen Spielberg or Clint Eastwood and this was no "Band of Brothers", but instead of making this film, Gross should have done what exactly? Wait for someone else to step up and make a big-budget Canadian movie about one of the key eras in our history? Unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen. I have to give him a lot of credit for getting off his a$$ and doing the very hard work making this film.
Tell ya what: if you want to make a Canadian "Band of Brothers" or "Letters from Iwo Jima", get a hundred and fifty million bucks together, hire some A-list international talent, and make it.
I appreciate "doers" as well, but this was a bad film. Also, no one said he had to hire A-list talent to make a good film. I do not even know where to begin discussing honest artistic creation with you. He may have worked hard on the production/coordination side, but was it worth it when the writing, acting, script, plot, characters, editing, were so atrociously bad? I felt this project was about Gross' ego. What I see is the "cool" factor; he wanted to make a "cool film" with "cool dialogue" - he wanted to make a Canadian Epic, but none of that should have been in his head when creating this film from beginning to end. And, I don't think he can act; at the very least he should have put someone else in the lead. Humility is humanity and I think that is what most people want to see from performers/actors/creators. Sidenote: I think the DOP did a good job.
shareno one said he had to hire A-list talent to make a good film.
I am. Nobody involved in that film was A-list or able to move to the A-list. Note that some of the renowned Australian films on the Great War involved people like Mel Gibson and George Miller who soon went on to bigger and better things.
The fact is that Canada is a small country with a limited market and budget. With very few exceptions, the best Canadian talent already works in Hollywood - and charges accordingly for their effort. Nor is is required that a filmmaker limit himself to one nation's talent. Much of the talent in Band of Brothers were British, for instance - like Damian Lewis "Major Winters". Ridley Scott who did Blackhawk Down is not American either.
You do get what you pay for. Saving Private Ryan cost nearly four times Passchendaele, and would have cost more had Tom Hanks not taken a share of the profits rather than his usual twenty million dollar salary - more than Passchendaele's total cost.
I don't think he can act; at the very least he should have put someone else in the lead.
Perhaps he should have - of course, why then would he have bothered to make the movie? One thing about bigger-budgets is that they also place constraints on the auteur. When close to a hundred million dollars is at stake, the people paying for the movie have certain expectations. A rookie screenwriter and director aren't among them.
I agree that a lot of what you said may have solved the problem, but sometimes money or A-list actors can't save a project either. What I think can is: script, script script, and an honest artistic motivation. However, sometimes a film just can't be saved with certain people involved. It's too bad, that was a lot of Canadian funding that could have helped a lot of Canadian film. I feel bad for Gross; it must have been embarrassing and awkward leaving the theatre after the TIFF screening, or maybe he thought when people said to him "it was great", they meant it.
shareI was expecting a world war 1 movie but all I got was 10 min of action and then the rest was romance. Also the people acted mordern, I doubt people had alot of sex before marriage in that time but in the movie it seems quite normal.
The movie is unrealistic, some people explode by artillery, others get blown away, others just lose a limb, and the annoying kid gets blown up, debris magically forms a cross with him as jesus, and he survives that! When that scene happend I was thinking "oh, he died, well that's actually supris...wait what?" And then the Paul Gross runs to the other side, picks up the cross and then HE starts to act like Jesus holding the cross. And then the rain stops, the clouds magically dissapear and a hawk is flying around going "herpaderp".
So even the few action scenes that were in this movie were ruined by scenes like that because it irritates me when when there are religious symbols in movies.
The kid was irritating, the romance unwanted, the action scenes unrealistic and irritating and the characters didn't act genuine. All I want is a good WWI movie that's actually about the war, not bloody romance.
Well clearly opinions differ. Honestly, I don't know a single negative remark to tell about this movie.
shareWell said!!!!
I can't make up a bad thing about this film either.
and the fact that the Canadians were defending all the time is not something bad because in 1917, they did for quite some time restrict their actions to defence.