An enjoyable and entertaining movie, but it suffers somewhat because Anne is such an iconic and cherished figure that almost any deviation from Montgomery's source novels is bound to disappoint.
In extrapolating Montgomery's characters to an entirely new World War I story, this movie is in fact completely disconnected from anything Montgomery ever wrote. And while I appreciated the story on its own terms, I'm all too aware that many people have already strongly disagreed. The story has a much faster pace than many people expect of Anne, and not everybody accepts the performances as befitting the best-loved characters in the history of Canadian film.
It also features one glaring continuity error -- at Marilla's funeral in the "Road to Avonlea" series (upon the real-life death of Colleen Dewhurst), we were told that Gilbert and Anne were already married. But at the beginning of this movie, several years after Marilla's death, Gilbert and Anne have yet to exchange vows.
If you can accept this film on its own terms, it does have a lot to recommend it (especially the last two hours). It is an undeniably good war movie.
If you believe that a movie should be faithful to its source material, however, you may find yourself throwing things at the screen, because as much as this is how Anne would handle the situations in which she finds herself, in the original novels she never found herself in these situations.
In extrapolating Montgomery's characters to an entirely new World War I story, this movie is in fact completely disconnected from anything Montgomery ever wrote. And while I appreciated the story on its own terms, I'm all too aware that many people have already strongly disagreed. The story has a much faster pace than many people expect of Anne, and not everybody accepts the performances as befitting the best-loved characters in the history of Canadian film.
It also features one glaring continuity error -- at Marilla's funeral in the "Road to Avonlea" series (upon the real-life death of Colleen Dewhurst), we were told that Gilbert and Anne were already married. But at the beginning of this movie, several years after Marilla's death, Gilbert and Anne have yet to exchange vows.
If you can accept this film on its own terms, it does have a lot to recommend it (especially the last two hours). It is an undeniably good war movie.
If you believe that a movie should be faithful to its source material, however, you may find yourself throwing things at the screen, because as much as this is how Anne would handle the situations in which she finds herself, in the original novels she never found herself in these situations.