Before Dawn

This movie feels cheap. I really hope it was, because if it wasn't someone screwed up big time. It starts in WA and the war scenes look like someone's dad got his excavator and dug some trenches and built some retaing walls in WA. Its looks ridiculous. They've taken every lame war cliche in the book and shoehorned it into the script but the actors deliver their lines like they are school kids. Barely one looks, acts or moves like they've done any soldiering. It's hard to watch. It comes off like a high school kids media project. Not worthy of the ANZACS. If your going to make an Aussie war movie do it right...

This may not be an epic war movie but it's an important story about how young and naive our young soldiers were when they signed up for WW1.

It tells the story of young man conflicted between loyalty to his family sheep station and his mates volunteering for the war.

The conditions these kids fought under were appalling but the fought well and honourably.

There have been lots of war movies but most are American and about heroes....this one is about Aussie kids.

It was not the best movie but if you think about the era, 1916, and the sacrifices these soldiers made in a foreign country under terrible conditions, it's told well.

I saw this movie today and it wasn't bad at all.

I'm a fan of war movies, more like war movies based on true stories, and I can't say I was disappointed watching this.

It's not a movie that people are used to seeing and I'm talking about the fact that it's not an action movie with a lot of battles and more. It's actually a kind of drama film where you can see what young Australians were dealing with in the First World War, what a big problem the equipment in the trenches was and the fear that young people went into.

I enjoyed it, it was, again, a decent film and I learned a few things about ANZAC and for some newbie actors and a young producer with 10 million dollars. Budget and a production with over 1000 people, it was a great job.

While I had never heard about this 2024 war movie titled "Before Dawn", I must admit that I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch it on account of it being a war movie.

However, writers Jordon Prince-Wright and Jarrad Russell delivered a slow paced movie, so very, very slow. You have to sit through more than 60 minutes of the movie where nothing worthwhile really happens. So more than half of the movie was squandered on setting the stage and establishing characters, but not really succeeding in any great way of doing so. And that just didn't really pan out all that well in terms of providing proper entertainment for me.

I was not familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but I will say that the acting performances were fair, despite the fact that the movie's script failed to get off to a proper running start.

Visually then "Before Dawn" was good, it definitely looked and felt like a war movie. Though it was a bit odd why all the trenches were so shallow that the soldiers had to constantly hunch over in order to move without being shot. There were some nice attention to details, and the uniforms were good.

I am sure that diehard war movie fans will enjoy "Before Dawn" a lot more than I did, especially if you don't mind a slow paced narrative that focuses on establishing characters.

While I managed to sit through 100 minutes that the movie ran for, director Jordon Prince-Wright didn't really manage to entertain me all that much. And this is definitely not a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time. I have to admit that I was definitely expecting a bit more action from a movie such as this, and it felt like it was a squandered opportunity to show some great trench warfare on the screen.

My rating of "Before Dawn" lands on a less than mediocre four out of ten stars.

I was very excited for this film and for more Australian war films to be made, but I almost walked out numerous times. There is no story, no character development, the sets never change, the dialogue was abysmal and of course it is so far beyond historically inaccurate. The trenches are like 5 feet deep and always look muddy and in a terrible state, the uniforms were not put together by someone who knows the period, the medical conditions are laughably wrong and the battle scenes are farcical. This is a low budget film that thinks it is a high budget film in scope, trying to cover multiple years of the war instead of just focusing on a small time frame and a small group of characters, and because of that this apparent $9m film feels like it was made for about $50,000. Everything is wrong and it feels wrong.