the thin red line

Well this wasn't quite what I was expecting.

I have to say I wasn't expecting much. I knew it was a war film and I knew it was an old war film (as in a film set in an old war, rather than being black and white or something), but if I'm totally honest I wasn't entirely sure if it was WW2 or the Korean War. Certainly the imagery suggested that sort of time period, rather than, say, Vietnam.

What I really wasn't expecting was something akin to an art house war movie. Indeed, I didn't actually think there was such a genre. And, to be frank, I didn't find it particularly enjoyable, so maybe there isn't.

I've read that the reviews for the film have been generally good. I can kinda understand that - it has the feel of being the sort of film critics would quite enjoy, but I found it a bit pretentious, if I'm honest.

Let me explain it this way - when I'm out walking I tend to listen to audio books. With the amount of walking I do I've actually gotten through quite a few and one of the themes of stuff I've listened to has been "classics". Now by classics I actually mean those well known things that most people are aware of but have never actually read.

In particular this has focused on science fiction, but there have been a few others too. Anyway, the point is that a few of the books actually stretch back to Victorian times and the one of most importance here is Frankenstein.

In particular, when I was listening to Frankenstein I was rather struck by how purple (or flowery) the prose is. In modern writing guides you're encouraged not to fanny about with fancy words, not least of all because, as I did here, purple prose can be kinda boring.

But also, and of most relevance here, I was struck by how eloquent the Monster is. As I'm sure you know, Frankenstein creates a human and while the film version of Igor bringing him a criminal's brain isn't in the novel (it's not actually the case that Frankenstein stitches human body parts together in the book - it's more of a chemistry thing) the idea she presents of a newly created man being able to learn language to quite the level of eloquence that he manages is, frankly, daft. Not to mention that he teaches himself to read.

And that's a big part of the problem I had with this film.

Every so often there'll be a chunk of narration from some of the soldiers. The soldiers aren't presented as being anything other than ordinary soldiers, yet these voice over's are incredibly fanciful and thoughtful and extremely eloquent. They're not the words of soldiers, in other words, and I found that horribly jarring.

I think, if I'm honest, taking out that narration and chopping some of the early stuff out to make it a less bum-numbing sub-2 hours in length, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. Certainly the basic story that's there and the messages it's trying to convey worked, but those bits of narration were like being slapped with a wet fish.