Reviews

This film puts forward a very interesting moral question, which is apparently misunderstood by a lot of people who have seen it, judging by some of the comments below.

This film depicts a situation where a commanding officer believes he and his men are receiving heavy fire from a crowd of civilians. He therefore orders his men to fire into the crowd. He is then put on trial.

The question raised by this film is whether or not this event occurs because the officer, Childers, is a murderous individual, or because he behaves as any soldier would given his situation, to remove a perceived threat.

(That crowd of gun-carrying civilians later in the film is NOT an absolute representation of the reality of the crowd, as some seem to think, but is a representation of the situation Childers believed that he faced at that time - crucially, we see him to have been wounded by a sniper's ricochet, leading him to believe that he has received fire from street level, among the crowd - hence his order to fire in that direction).

It is, however, NOT a film that questions whether or not it's okay to shoot at civilians, and it is in this regard that it is misunderstood. The director has said he believes his film is arguing that whenever armed men exchange fire in the vicinity of civilians, civilians will die and it is for this reason that war should not be undertaken except with a grave awareness of the inevitable consequences.

This does not alter the fact that Childers ordered his soldiers to fire into a crowd of civilians. It is surely self-evident that this act is a war crime, and should not be excused on the grounds that it is simply the way that war is inevitably fought, or that Childers was acting to eliminate a perceived threat and not from some malicious desire for carnage. I find the argument that any officer in that position would have given the same order to be an interesting and disturbingly plausible one.

But. This film would be considered utterly and inarguably offensive if it took such a position on the way British Paratroopers fired into a civilian crowd in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday because they believed they were receiving fire from among the crowd. A similar film might be made about the Amritsar massacre, and would deservedly be despised. When soldiers deliberately kill civilians, (whatever their reasons) it is a crime - we know this, why do we need to debate it?

I admire the fact that this film attempted to take a challenging and uncomfortably real moral issue of war - that soldiers are trained and routinely expected to carry out their military objectives at any cost, even the lives of civilians if necessary. However, I despise the fact that this film appears to present no real case to the effect that just because a war-crime is committed as a result of an understandable military judgement, it does not cease to be a war crime.

After all, there are plenty of arguments as to why the deliberate targetting of civilians can further military objectives - this does not mean we should ever cease to find this repugnant and monstrous, even if our generals may sometimes find it necessary. Childers committed a crime, and however sound his reasons for doing so, it remains a crime. The soundness of his intent does not mean that the massacre he authored becomes in any way acceptable, or is transformed into some hideous accident. The incident that establishes the story, much like the film itself, cannot be mitigated by the soundness of motive behind it.

It is made very much worse by the fact that while the film may contain a dilemma, it is not presented in such a way that leads us to really consider it. The dishonourable conduct of the prosecutors lead us inevitably to sympathise with the defence in a very black-and-white way, and the Hero Who Should Not Stand Alone (as the tag-line leads me to see Childers) expresses nothing resembling a glimmer of remorse at the 'collateral damage' from his actions. If this is a Hero, I'd hate to see a Bad Guy. Oh no, wait, I did - those were the guys shooting from across the street, the guys who created the situation where Childers had absolutely no choice but to order his men to pour machine gun fire into a crowd of civilians without any warning. "You made me do it" wasn't a good excuse in the school playground, and it doesn't get any better when we become old enough to carry guns and fire them at other people.

Really, this is a quite fantastically repugnant film.

I'm obviously a bit of an old misery, but I thought this film was terrible. I had set out to enjoy it as well, but it was completely ruined for my by the fact that I had just watched the most recent version of Feval's 'Le Bossu', which is wonderful. In the matter of breathtaking swordfights, dashing heroes, creepy villains and treacherous plotters, Le Bossu is one of the best films of the 1990s - and it shows the roughly contemporary Mask of Zorro as the sorry, overblown mess that it is.

Which is not to say that I dare dis El Banderas. He's an excellent choice, and has the necessary roguish charisma for the role. I don't particularly mind the plot. I do mind that Catherine Zeta Jones gets another chance to bask in her over-rated glory. Truly, this is a woman with the body of a film-star and the talent of a TV presenter.

I also mind that, presumably, at an early stage of the production the director looked around the set and said "Hmmm... what's missing. I know. Bring out the Hopkins', and sent his lacky to unlock the trunk where they keep the Welsh Windbag until the call of some underwritten star-part stirs him from his sleep. Unless somebody has plans to produce Ivor The Engine: The Movie anytime soon I would severely recommend they keep that trunk locked for the time being.

You know what else I minded? That crazy prospector guy, who looked like he'd stepped out of a Wild West computer game or some theme park ride - though this is very much in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film, to be fair.

This film has lots of loud noise and explosions, is quite over-the-top, and is all the poorer for it. Something of a missed opportunity, really.

You know, people rave about this film but I much prefer Disney's cartoon version with those spotty dogs. They made some kind of weird serial killer movie out of a great family film. They'll be making some kind of sick fake-documentary horror film out of Hansel and Gretel next.

It's a curious thing about all of the films that Randall Wallace has made, but they invariably have this horrible, irritating noise on the soundtrack. Every single one, and We Were Soldiers is no exception... there it is, that insistent, nagging, formless and faintly rotten distraction. Hearing it is like having a decaying moth twitching in your ear.

And stranger still, this repulsive, over-ripe interference always seems to coincide with the movement of the actors' lips. I of course thought at first that this was just dialogue, but hah, I was young and foolish. I know better today. Even in the world of Modern Movies, such awful sounds couldn't seriously be intended to convey characterisation. Nobody could seriously be so unutterably brazen in the deployment of such blatant exposition, such ugly and stupid sub-John Wayne banter - nobody who once won wrote an oscar-winning epic could seriously produce such banal and mindless wittering.

Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps it IS dialogue, but really... to assume that this anything more than (at most) a dadaist selection of random noises that have a semblance of meaning would be a step down the ladder of evolution. Next I would be examining chicken entrails for their subtle messages.

So, defective soundtrack aside, what did I think?

Well, I am assured by an article I read a little while ago that this film came truly 'from the bottom of Wallace's heart'. I suspect this to have been a misprint, as the film I saw gave every impression of having come truly from the heart of the man's bottom.

One has to concede that Mel Gibson achieved something remarkable in his cinema career of the 1980s and 1990s. It was, after all, not unheard of for an actor to go through his career playing essentially the same character. John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart immediately spring to mind as having set this precedent.

What Gibson did that was remarkable was to maintain not just the same screen persona, but broadly the same screen character through a large cycle of films. After three Mad Max films, four 'Mad Max Cop' films, one 'William Shakespeare's Mad Max' and of course this film - which I feel we may in all fairness rename 'Mad Jock McMax' - one thinks it reasonable to argue that Gibson had really cornered the market when it came to playing ultraviolent nutcases with dead girlfriends. It is only suprising that the lead role in the modern classic 'Mad Maximus' went to Russell Crowe instead of Gibson.

Then again, perhaps Gibson realised that he had taken Mad Max as far as he could with Braveheart. Braveheart is, after all, a real old-fashioned Hollywood epic, and as good a place to leave the character as any. It matches its style with a good old-fashioned grasp of history, only surpassed in the cinematic annals by Carry On Up The Khyber.

Patrick McGoohan is especially noteworthy in the role of Mr. Burns From The Simpsons - it is a role he suits down to the ground, and he effortlessly steals the whole show from under the noses of all.

Nonetheless, the praise heaped upon this film at time of original release seems now quite unwarranted. It was, and remains, something of a Robin Hood movie. Enjoyable and impressive, but not serious cinema. The liberties taken with history are breathtaking - the most grievious example being the direct link drawn between Wallace's death and the Battle of Bannockburn, which ignores the small gap of 15 years and the Bruce's hard-fought campaign leading up to that final battle.

It's a pity that one national hero should be so diminished by the praise directed at another. But then, one suspects that had the screenwriter been called Randall Bruce instead of Randall Wallace we may have been treated to a very different film.

Personally, to my moral discomfort and despite knowing better, I kind of enjoy films like, say, Top Gun. It's fun, and that is as good a reason to watch a film as any.

However, I feel that by this point in time (well over ten years after Top Gun) the 'fun' excuse is wearing extremely thin as mitigation for the unleashing of badly-crafted, under-written, stupid and empty firework displays like this. I'm a guy, I can appreciate Big Gay Death Machines just like anybody else. I like to see rocket-powered phalluses tearing up the sky to a soundtrack of aggressive music as much as the next man, but I'm increasingly concerned at the nagging argument of my conscience that just because something is COOL! it is not necessarily therefore good, or worthwhile.

Behind Enemy Lines is the kind of film I could quite happily see exterminated from the fabric of existence. Not that it's especially awful, just rather offensive - a perfect example of how to insult an audience. Despite the cunning disguise of a handful of impressively-staged setpieces this is a lazy, stupid, and ignorant film that apparently sets out to propagate these very same virtues in the mind of a viewer.

Did you know that anybody who wants to avoid restarting a genocidal war in which a quarter of a million people have already died is a coward? Did you know that it's okay to run that risk to save one serviceman who got himself into trouble by disobeying orders? Did you know its okay to run that risk if the serviceman has photographic evidence of mass graves in a country where mass-graves are fairly thick on the ground and widely known about? Even though the effort of recovering these photos may actually result in lots more mass-graves which won't be captured on film? Did you know that Serb soldiers wore Croat insignia?

I knew none of this. Thanks to this film I have been re-educated.

It was on only my third mission for Her Majesty's intelligence services that I was captured. My respected father had faced down Stazi interrogators in East Berlin years before in the same line of work, and I had no intention of betraying his honourable record.

Yet, my confidence was soon proven to be misplaced. I had not expected the true variety of torture that my captors would employ to encourage me to talk. Scorpion venom, bamboo splinters, electric shocks... many unspeakable torments, but none of them could persuade me to betray my country. I would not talk, I would not utter a single word.

After the first month, I was a wreck, a wretched shadow of a human being. After the second month, I had begun to pray for death.

After six months, I had talked - I had told them everything I had ever known, a hundred times - and yet they still tormented me.

Soon they stopped torturing me, but they kept me imprisoned. On a diet that allowed me little more than the luxury of slow starvation, I was in a state of continual exhaustion and weakness. I lost teeth. I was once allowed to see myself in the mirror and I knew then that I would never again be the man I had once been, not without the help of God and all his angels.

Then, after three years a sparrow began to visit my cell. The few crumbs I could spare to feed the little animal encouraged him to be my friend, and soon his visits made my life a little less lacking in despair. Until, one morning my guard saw this, and shot the sparrow. My despair was profound beyond the telling.

And it was only at this point that the experience became objectively worse than watching Pearl Harbour.

"When I get home I'm gonna marry that gal o'mine and buy us a little house with a white picket fence"

No-one actually utters that old chestnut, but this film is so cliched that within 5 minutes of it starting I was making bets as to which character would be the unfortunate soul to voice the line. My money was on Ranger Danny Grimes (played in his usual so-so manner by Ewan McGregor) - his somewhat wimpy character simply screamed 'I'm dead by the end of the film, me!', but sadly that wasn't the case. Shame.

After a little, simplistic scene-setting which basically boils down to 'Farrah Aidid = Bad Man' we get to the real meat of the film. And what processed, lumbering, bovine meat it is. Macho soldier cliches are presented to us without the faintest hint of irony - when a soldier tears a plaster cast from his arm it seems almost an homage to the Rambo movies. But they were filmed in the 1980's, and B.H.D was filmed in 2001. Surely things should have progressed in that time? People can't still be buying in to those tired old cliches? Surely...

Our heroes then charge (well, fly) into the city of Mogadishu to seize the leaders of Habr Gidr, the clan under the control of the aforementioned dictator. For reasons that are not made particularly obvious to the simple viewer, this is all done without informing the UN of their intentions, or even their close allies in the campaign, the Pakistani peacekeepers.

What appears to have been a rather sparsely devised Plan A goes smoothly right up until they actually arrive at Mogadishu when chaos theory comes into play and it all falls messily, noisily, to pieces, forcing them to resort to Plan B. What do you mean, there's no Plan B?

"30 minutes in and out" nothing can go wrong, so no need for a Plan B? Oops...

Essentially, what follows is a convoy of trucks trundling around getting shot at quite a bit; hordes of anonymous Somalis scurry around, shooting but mostly getting shot, and there's a whole barrel-full of bad acting thrown in for good measure (stand up Mr. Hartnett). And what lunatic thought of reuniting three members of the cast of that other cinematic historical document Pearl Harbour? As if this film didn't have credibility problems as it was.

This film also displays a startling coldness to the Somali casualties in large part. While it would be insensitive to mock or deride the loss of 19 Americans in this exercise, it is extraordinary that the film refers to these young men as having 'laid down their lives', and yet mentions almost as an incidental that around 1000 Somalis were also 'killed'. No laying down of lives for them then? And as exemplified by one of the better scenes in the film, many Somali combatants were little more than children.

Add to this a scene in which a soldier berates the UN for not being battle-ready when they had not been informed of the operation, and you have a fairly repulsive exercise in jingoism.

If you enjoy cliched, propagandist militarism then this is most definitely the film for you. Otherwise I'd file it under the label 'only if there's nothing better to do'.

The spiel that accompanies this abomination claims it to be the greatest 'horror film' of the decade, yet I've seen more terrifying things in the changing rooms of my local gym!

I won't spoil the "plot" (and I'm being very charitable with that description), suffice it to say that a very promising start is quickly ended when the demonic protagonist of the film is shown to look very much like Albert Steptoe's long-haired brother. Much to my amusement this "creature of the dark place" even performs the Steptoe trademarked limp/waddle. From that point on I simply couldn't resist humming the TV programme's theme tune whenever the creature came into view.

Abysmal acting, shockingly bad script, dire direction and an ending which simply screams 'there's going to be a sequel whether you like it or not' all make me wonder just how much the critics must have been paid to heap the praise on this movie that it received when released.

Unless low-brow, embarassingly trashy sub 'B-movie' flicks are your thing, avoid like the plague.

There is a point in this film where Mr. Steve Buscemi's character Rockhound opines 'this is like a goddam Greek tragedy'.

I would suggest a contrary argument, which basically runs 'No it's not.' Unless one is perhaps comparing it to an unhappy love affair with a Cephalonian Fishwife, and while that sounds altogether more believable I don't think I can be forgiven for dismissing this as the most likely intended meaning of the comment.

(To be entirely fair, one could argue that the principal relationships in the film, between Tyler, Willis and Affleck display a certain Elektra-complex quality, but this is frankly about as Greek as it gets. Unless one counts the relationship between 'fellow warriors' Willis and Affleck)

However, I am distracted from the meat of the matter. Another line, spoken this time by Willis, claims that he has never aimed for a depth he has not reached. Armageddon certainly proves this. It is a remarkably bad film, even by the standards of the Hollywood blockbuster in which inanity masquerades as dialogue, and overblown special effects shoulder everything else out of the picture.

Indeed, it is at times difficult to believe that this film was not meant as a joke - it comes across as a grotesque parody of the MTV-style action film pioneered by Tony Scott when his leash was still held by Simpson and Bruckheimer. With Armageddon, Michael Bay cements his position as directorial Dark Apprentice to Tony Scott's Emperor Palpatine, and produces a work which fulfils all of the brain-damaged potential that lay unexploited in such restrained and considered exercises as Top Gun.

For example, why does everything in this film explode? Everything explodes! I'd seriously be worried if I was related to Bruce Willis in this film - he can't go anywhere without the place exploding.

Which is not to say that I totally disliked this film, believe me. It has a certain reckless enthusiasm which sweeps you along all the time you don't attempt to think or anything; Peter Stormare is enormous fun and ends up stealing the show as Crazy Comedy Russian, and there is a certain amusement to be gained from the variously ludicrous degrees of seriousness displayed by the other cast members. Bruce Willis also delivers a performance that is by far his most layered and effective, if one discounts for a moment his turns in The Jackal and Hudson Hawk.

To speak personally for a moment, Armageddon will always have a special place in my own heart; watching it in the cinema I found myself laughing out loud in an extremely obnoxious manner, so much so that I later realised my selfish treatment of other audience members and wrote and complained to the cinema. They should not, I argued, allow individuals to spoil the cinema experience for everybody else, and while I didn't exactly mention that it was I who had behaved so appallingly, I did demand that they do their best to prevent it from happening in future. They very kindly insisted that I accept a voucher which allowed me and three friends to attend another showing of any film I wished absolutely free, where I was assured there would be no further disruption from unruly patrons (and indeed, I was quite pacified on this occasion). You may count it as a mark of just how bad Armageddon truly is that even after this experience I felt that I had been a little bit cheated for having to pay for the privelege of seeing Armageddon in the first place.

It's fun, don't get me wrong - but the fact is that, like having a Big Mac, taking Class A drugs, or consorting with East European women who insist on getting married in a hurry, this is a rather likeable experience - but extremely bad for you.

Armageddon, as many of the intended audience for this film doubtless know, is said to be the location of the last battle against the forces of the Antichrist as predicted in 'Revelations'. There is little of this in the film 'Armageddon', but the very fact of this film's financial success might lead us to suppose that at least in cinematic terms the battle has now been lost.

Much has been made of how this extraordinary exercise in cinematic verisimilitude is a powerful anti-war statement, when in fact it is arguably no such thing. Indeed, there are many points in this film where one feels that it is less a 'powerful anti-war statement' and more a '1970s War Movie', The Dirty Dozen with highbrow pretensions.

This is a terrible shame of course as the film has many virtues; combat is depicted in a defining cinematic fashion, and generally presents war as existing in a moral void where, after all, the participants are attempting to slaughter each other. Good manners seem like something of an irrelevance when the bullets begin to fly.

Nonetheless, the film remains mired in the results its own incestuous matings with Clint Eastwood-Era cliche. Soldiers talk about their mothers in a church at night. Isolated and demoralised soldiers face down overwhelming odds. Soldiers improvise powerful weaponry from a everyday objects and some explosive. A charismatic, strong-but-silent soldier buys it in the last reel prompting many in the audience to pine "Oh... I liked him!"

And such obviousness is, frankly, the least of the film's worries. In a pivotal (if practically sepia-tinted) scene Captain Dale Dye adds another silver-haired martial patriarch to his already extensive Cv of such characters, and expresses the view that sending a squad of men after one paratrooper because of his mother is simple foolishness, on a purely mathematical level if nothing else. His CO offers a devastating counter-argument which is... nonsensical, frankly.

As the scene closes, the CO having read out a very admirable letter by Abraham Lincoln, he has not made the case for his proposed military venture. He hasn't made the case for anything, actually. In fact, if the letter has a message it is that young men die in war and tragically that's inevitable and the bereaved parents should be proud of their sacrifice. Even if one agrees with this sentiment it is still rather difficult to see how it supports the case for sending a squad to find Jimmy Ryan. Indeed, it would appear to run utterly counter to it! But presumably everybody - including the otherwise reliable Captain 'Calm Down Son' Dye - is too caught up in the moment to still be, you know, thinking or anything.

Worst of all, the characterisation of the squad themselves is largely cardboard-cut-out. A group of very able young actors are all saddled here with underdeveloped characters, all of whom appear to have been freshly unearthed from a metaphorical toybox where these lead soldiers have presumably been languishing since 1977. Only the ironically-named Sergeant Horvath truly impresses, and that is as much because of the way in which Tom Sizemore masterfully transforms cliche into archetype. It is surely plain to all that had this film involved any lengthy sequences in a French or Italian town, the good Sergeant would have shacked up with the madam of the local whorehouse in a matter of minutes.

This film is something of a Jekyll & Hyde then - quite honestly it's far too exciting to be genuinely anti-war, and perversely far too glib and simplistic on the subject of heroism and sacrifice to be an effective memorial to those who gave their lives. It's a shame that Spielberg did not choose to make a film that was in one camp or the other rather than straddling both in this way. As a technical achievement this film should not be missed, but it should not be mistaken for more than it is - a glorified 1970s war movie. Any who truly doubt this should reflect that the makers of this film saw no moral complications in adapting it into a succesful series of computer games, in which war is once again an exciting and heroic game.

At the time of this film's cinema release no less a critic than the much admired and feared HMS Germaine Greer discharged a broadside in its general direction to the effect that it had several perfectly good endings, all of which the director chose to ignore in favour of another. I find myself in agreement.

Though somewhat lacking in focus in a number of important respects, this film has a degree of intelligence and some powerful moments; the film successfully raises questions about the point at which a 'machine' becomes a living thing, since after all, isn't a human being a biological machine? And if machines might be considered 'alive', can we deceive ourselves into believing that a non-conformity to 'normal' human behaviour makes the faux-human androids any less alive than us? It's an interesting question.

Another interesting question is 'What On Earth Possessed Steven Spielberg???"

I gather that some very old dramatists in some foreign country or other had this thing called a Deus Ex Machina, probably familiar to keen viewers of Star Trek; when a storyline had reached an unsatisfactory and unresolvable point, the playwright would simply write in a divine intervention that would make everything alright again, in direct contravention of dramatic progression... logic... decency... all that stuff.

Well, Spielberg seems to have been taking notes from his ancestors, for when this film reaches a very sad but dramatically very sound ending, and you get that familiar pang of 'oh, please don't let it end here', Spielberg does the worst possible thing he could - and listens to that silent cry of the sentimental heart.

Indeed, Spielberg's Deus Ex Machina is startlingly literal when it appears, but I'll leave you to enjoy that discovery in your own time.

I find it extraordinary that a man of Spielberg's ability could go to such grim lengths to crowbar in the sweetly toxic ending he finally, unconvincingly does. It is this single decision which ruins the film, tainting this interesting if not especially distinguished effort with an artless, child-pleasing finale. This is made all the worse by the fact that it takes a good 20-30 minutes to import this unwelcome and out-of-place conclusion. I do not wildly exxaggerate when I say that I spent much of this time with my head in my hands, ridden with despair at the stupidity unfolding before me.

Nice film, shame about the Ending. It's right up there with Stephen King's 'IT' on the "WHAT ARE YOU DOING MAN???" factor.

You are warned.