MovieChat Forums > Michiel de Ruyter (2016) Discussion > The worst opening battle scene in war fi...

The worst opening battle scene in war film history


The "special" effects largely consisted of someone off-screen throwing, in slow motion, entire barrels of wood chips out of what would be the cabin door under the poop deck.

The Admiral in charge gets shot, and sends an "all captains repair on board" signal to his fleet, apparently immediately, and the captains go. Some of them apparently by swimming. In the middle of a major fleet engagement.

Did no one dare tell the director "this is LUDRICROUS!" ????????????

It got so unbearably bad before the 10 minute mark, I gave up on the film right there.

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Is that what happened? Poop deck? Haha! I was going with the flow on this one, especially when youre busy reading the subtitles. Yes wood chips being blasted out using compressed air effect is kinda overdone but overall story was ok to me. I read up on the guy after watching so i learned something at the end of the day. But thats just me

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So you guys are saying that cannon balls did not rip up wood chips when they hit wooden beams? What then caused all that carnage in those ships? Besides the cannon balls and other metals, wood splinters did also make damage.

Oh, wait. You are some of the guys that want to go to actual battles and pick up the real items. Tighten up your belts. There is no time travel yet.

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Exactly! Also did they not use 'Chain-Shot as well back then?
(Meaning two cannon balls attached to a chain...)
That would make a LOT of 'Wood Chips'.

I just watched this film this morning on Netflix.
It was well done in my opinion.
If you look at ALL the movies and Films (there is a difference) that is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc, etc a good majority of them are simply pure crap.
Formula Movies. Same old thing over and over.
This film at least tried to break away from that.

I really enjoyed the 'Age of Sail' Battle Scenes.

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You only say "opening" because you apparently didn't see the later ones...

The "special" effects largely consisted of someone off-screen throwing, in slow motion, entire barrels of wood chips out of what would be the cabin door under the poop deck.


Yeah, they kept doing that in every battle scene and it did get kind of old kind of fast.

The Admiral in charge gets shot, and sends an "all captains repair on board" signal to his fleet, apparently immediately, and the captains go. Some of them apparently by swimming. In the middle of a major fleet engagement.


This sort of thing was the other major flaw in the movie (IMO): the ridiculously fast pace of the overall battles and how crazy close together the ships were (on each side) before engagement.

I realize that such slow-paced stuff like a pre-steamship naval battle is going to be difficult to depict on screen, but regardless, this is not the way to do it.

Perhaps some off-screen narration, time cuts, something to help the viewer get a feel for what it might have been like, yet also understand what actually occurred, I really don't know.

But the ships scurrying around the ocean like "units" in a game of Starcraft just didn't work for me...

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