Film Reviews by CM

Wierd, as a mixture of a shoot-em-up video game, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings genres. Very clever CGI animated backgrounds but some of the acting is amateurish, and the two stars, Sean Bean and Lena Headey, are quite different in appearance fom any preceeding roles I have seen them in. Like "Game of Thrones". Sean Bean has lost his usual rugged features, and Headey is disguised with wierd pale blue contact lenses and a short pinky-grey wig.

The plot is pretty convoluted and hard to follow. I couldn't finish it.

I'd give it 4 out of 10.

Although the story mostly takes place during the second world war, you hardly notice it. Everything is pretty happy. I love the ancient vintage car one of the characters drives; it is a Peugeot Bebe dating from about 1912.

Writing as someone whose father was there, it is most unsatisfactory. Earlier he had been attacked by two French deserters while going behind a sand dune for a pee, and had to shoot them both with his revolver. None of that sort of thing shown, in fact that many thousand French troops were taken off too. He walked onto a Ramsgate paddle steamer by the Mole. No depiction of gallant rear-guard fighting, to much concentration on a single Spitfire, not enough smoke from burning supplies, and the troops waiting to be evacuated were amazingly well shaved and tidy. And what about the sight of modern container cranes on the horizon? None of the planning behind the evacuation shown either.

I cannot recommend this film, in spite of its hype at the time.

An odd film as the Austrians speak perfect English, but the Italians speak subtitled Italian. The Austrians seem to be totally untrained reservists and are woefully under equipped for operating in high mountains. There is no mention of the terrible avalanche casualties which happened in December 1915, though the explosion of tunnelled Italian mines which took place very much later in the "Gebirgskrieg" mountain war is well depicted. Claudia Cardinale makes a cameo appearance in the wedding scene at the start of the story, looking remarkable for all her 80 or so years. Continuity is not great either, a soldier is holding his rifle left handed on one scene, and the sky is full of airliner con trails in another. But then this is not a historical documentary, so can be forgiven its massaging of history.