MovieChat Forums > Southcliffe (2013) Discussion > badly needs a miitary adviser!

badly needs a miitary adviser!


Given how basic the whole military angle is to this story, I can’t imagine why they didn’t take a bit more trouble to make it militarily believable.

First off: everybody - not just soldiers - knows that Britain is full of sad wannabes trying to pass themselves off as ex-SAS. Soldiers also know that the one thing real ex-SAS men don’t do is go around telling people that’s what they are. So the moment Stephen does that, in real life Chris would have instantly pegged him for a fraud or a fantasist, rather than saying ‘ooh, yes, please let me train with you’. And the writers went on to make it even sillier by giving Chris an uncle who had been in the same SAS unit Stephen was claiming to have served in. In real life, he’d automatically have made use of that; either by checking Stephen out with his uncle before rather than after taking the matter any further, or brightly saying ‘You were? You’ll know my uncle Alan then!’ and waiting to see how Stephen reacted. (I did just that only a few weeks ago, when someone I had just met claimed to have been a Para and fought at Goose Green. I said ‘How interesting! You’ll remember X from your unit, he lives just a few doors along my street!’ and watched him change the subject rapidly.)

And you’d really think they would have got a past or serving soldier to teach young Joe Dempsie to act being shot at like a real soldier, and tell the director what is or isn’t plausible. Even a teenager who’s been in cadets, or a student who has done a couple of terms in the uni OTC, knows that when you’re being sniped at you don’t rush about, wheezing as loudly as a grampus; you control your breathing, slow down, move quietly – and above all, you don’t show yourself above the skyline! The notion that poor panicky, blundering, wheezing Chris was a veteran of Helmand was utterly unbelievable.

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I got the impression that Chris went along with what Stephen was saying as he was taking the piss, like the people who harass mentally ill people to try and get them to admit to something embarrassing.

Chris's uncle wasn't necessarily in the SAS and might have claimed to have been to get at Stephen.

The main thing I found stupid is why anybody would be stupid enough to beat up a man they knew to own firearms and who was mentally unstable.

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We don't know the entire story yet, there is a possibility he WAS SAS, the fact he has evaded the largest UK policing operation in history suggests there is more to this than meets the eye.

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Uncle Douchebag said there was a Steven Morton in the infantry that washed out of SAS training or whatever, so either the Uncle was there and remembered Steven or he knew someone in the SAS that remembered him. He obviously learned something somewhere. It's not too far fetched to believe that Chris latched on to Steven as a buddy, given that we see he's suffering some kind of PTSD, the loss of his friend Jamie, and readjusting to being home

"You have to have faith for this to work on me!"

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Paul Mout evaded cops and sas in norththumberland. He was no Mcnab.

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they didnt know he had guns.

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