richard westwood-brookes

Strong on visual content, some remarkable visual effects, but a slow,predictable and ponderous story, reliant on some wooden performances and effectively going nowhere. There is the usual 'them and us popular uprising' suggestion which never materialises, the hope that there will be a leader who will liberate but liberate who from what, a cartoon character of a central villain spouting high sounding inanities and the usual 'dystopian' prediction that the future will be a dreary dark and overcrowded mess that has no hope of aspiration. If you think this film is any good then you'll believe the Emperor has new clothes

Without question the finest film I have ever seen. Everyone is talking about the direction which is superb, but what this film does more than any other war film I have seen is that it gets to the very heart of the humanity of the ordinary soldiers and the total tragedy of what they faced. Everyone and everything in this film is damned - the two central characters, the General who knows that their mission is doomed to failure with the slaughter of 1600 men as a result, the cynical Lieutenant who saves them off by giving them the last rights, the even more cynical Captain who warns that if they get to their destination they might still fail because the Colonel they are sent to warn might want to fight anyway, just got the hell of it and finally the Colonel who's hopes of ending the war are ruined by their message . But they are not the only ones: the raped landscape, the dead horses, the dead dog, once someone's beloved pet, the cows deliberately killed in the German retreat, the cherry orchard in full bloom cut down in a deliberate act of destruction, the sole surviving French woman in the totally destroyed town and the baby she cares for, not knowing who she is because her parents have obviously been killed. And you know that both will soon be dead themselves. The dead Germans who also litter the moonscape. This is what war is really about - no gung-ho heroes or John Wayne type speeches, just ordinary blokes, Terrified by every moment but stoically doing their duty and obeying their orders. A truly magnificent film that was so moving I cried throughout at the sheer unspoken bravery and humanity of it all. It was an experience I will never forget.