Chas Lacey

Oh dear. Who am I to go against the grain? I didn’t fight in the trenches and I don’t know much about writing screenplays and directing films but I found the basic premise totally unrealistic. On top of the unlikely reliance on a couple of junior NCO’s to deliver a vital order, and the absurdly modern dialogue, there’s the little matter of the brother in the destination regiment. When we eventually get to meet him, he turns out to be a well-spoken lieutenant played by Bodyguard Richard Madden. This despite his younger brother being a foul-mouthed squaddie with a cockney accent. Meanwhile the other lance corporal speaks in RP. The cockney one looks as if he hasn’t missed many meals but this is 1917 and surely they’d have been a bit underfed. I lost count of the bloated faces throughout the trenches not to mention the member of the Yorkshire regiment with another unconvincing cockney accent. Weren’t there any Yorkshireman around when they cast this? Then there’s the borrowings from other war films - long backtracking shots in the trenches straight from Kubrick’s Paths of Glory; a wholly implausible French woman with just the right amount of English, living in an Apocalypse Now-style ruin with a small child. Shades of La Grande Illusion here. Then there’s the river scene - this is supposedly somewhere near Bapaume - last time I looked it resembled Essex but there’s an absurd slalom down a Kong Island film set waterfall. Yet another bit of borrowing here, this time from John Boorman’s Deliverance. I’m amazed at the favourable critical reception this film has had. It left me stone cold. On the other hand, the play War Horse, with puppeteers operating a deliberately obvious model, was infinitely more moving.