Fabs
Posts: 444
Joined: 6/5/2000
From: London, U.K.
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Most Hollywood war movies would fit into this category.
Altough Hollywood has made some potentially great war movies, there are ingredients that spoil even their best endeavours.
Lionizing the "goodies" (smart, decent and always good and right)and demonizing the "baddies" (stupid, evil and always bad and wrong)is one of the greatest such sins.
Few Hollywood movies escape this trap, but the best they can do then is just de-personalize the enemy.
In other words, Hollywood producers treat audiences as morons and feel that they must take sides.
One exception I can think of is "The young lions", although that was more a drama staged during the war than a proper war movie.
"Cross of Iron" and "The Eagle has landed" are also notable exceptions. Both attempt to show a non-stereotype German point of view, which takes some courage, and probably kills the box office. (I would like to emphasize that I am not pro-German, but I am tired of seeing the Germans stereotyped and their position oversimplified).
Another beef I have is the battle re-creations, which often are simply shoddy. Battle scenes can be so badly re-created as to make me want to smash the screen. There are very few movies that get this right.
"Stalingrad" is the most noteworthy exception to this rule, in my book better than even SPR. Although after watching "Stalingrad" you have to go on suicide watch for a while!
I suppose making a truly great movie about World War II is a challenge that would tax the skills of modern film makers.
European directors from the first half of the last century may have been intellectually better equipped, but in those days it was the technology and the finances at their disposal that created limitations.
Modern directors would rather spend massive amounts on special effect intensive science fiction blockbusters than take up this challenge, and when they do the result is SPR, with excellent special effects but a very poor, totally fictional storyline that, as usual, oversentimentalizes some aspects and totally re-writes others, or "Thin red line", with the liberal moralizing that has been criticised in another post and that misses the point of the War in the Pacific entirely, not to mention the schizophrenic efforts to portray the Viet Nam conflict.
A movie (more likely a series of movies) that would fully and objectively explore the realities of the people involved in the conflict and give a less "carboard cutout", more realistic idea of what large scale battles looked, sounded and felt like, at the macro as well as the individual level, while being a very worthy idea, would probably not interest the sort of audience size that would cover the enormous cost of making it.
I also suspect that watching combat reproduced more realistically may not be at all exciting.
Long periods of silence and apparent inactivity broken by sudden, fast, furious, confusing and frantic activity, involving death and mutilation, followed by a return to sudden silence and apparent inactivity until the next furious burst is not a recipe for riveting audiences to their seats, and there are abject aspects of combat that most people would probably not want to know about.
So we have to make do with the substandard productions that find the money to be made and the audiences to pay for watching them.
I'd rather play Steel Panthers World at War any day these days.
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Fabs
[This message has been edited by Fabs (edited October 23, 2000).]
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Worst war movie you've ever seen - 
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-Andy
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Fabs
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