Combattant

I must say, I tend to really like films that Le Bouf plays in. He has a knack for picking good films, he just really does. As much as you might hate him personally, he knows a good story when he sees one.

This film I had heard very little about, I knew it had something to do with war, but not much else. Seems it is highly underrated. I'm not even sure if it had a theatrical release or not.

When the film opened I was pretty skeptical. It seemed boring as all hell. Slow moving. Not very interesting. Military guy, yadda yadda. The opening was tinted with confusing "flashback" type scenes, boring paranorama or desolated wasteland that wasn't explained and other apocalyptic type scenes that didn't seem to fit into the rest of the movie. I kind of started losing interest and was barely paying attention, when all of a sudden...

The movie took a crazy turn, and I realized what was really going on, and why everything seemed confusing and off with the timing. It all came together, and I was sincerely impressed.

The music is a little over the top and too sentimental at a lot of parts, but the story is very well written. You just don't realize it at first how brilliant it is.

7/10 because the first part was so confusing and I felt a lot of the music was bad and just distracted from what was happening.

I was in the marine corps and even being annoyed with slightest of military inaccuracies I must say this was a good movie. It does not have a happy ending and will not make you feel good but I think it's a good movie. I am usually skeptic and stick to reviews but I'm glad I ignored the reviews on this one. Give it a chance and try not to have expectations and I think you will see it as a good film.

I have never seen a performance like Shia gives in this my soul wept. It just proves he's the most underrated under appreciated actor of our generation.

I didn't know much about this film before I watched it. But WOW, My only question, how come the rating isn't higher? Absolutely beautiful film. The movie is about war and love and there are many film about that, but the way they did "man down" I've never seen before. Lots of symbolisms, and back and forth between timelines. I was really moved by it. I encourage people to watch it, the film deserves a higher rating.

Well, I certainly didn't expect this. I think I need to start by saying that this isn't a typical war film whatsoever. As I'm sure you've seen in the reviews prior, this film is made to demonstrate a very powerful message about veterans and PTSD. And it's a message that definitely got to me!

However, this is still a film and needs to be entertaining. And was it? Yes. I will say that how it was filmed was a bit annoying to me, I felt that it was just a bit too jumbled at times, which found it quite hard to understand what's actually going on. So the film has about 4 storylines going on, in past and present and you get like 15 mins of one, so maybe it's a flashback to him being a loving husband and father. Then it quickly switches to some war scene. I feel the director needed to just calm it. But overall it was still entertaining to watch.

You're basically waiting for this one moment to link everything. That moment/twist finally hits and it was genuinely brilliant and really does make the film. I was so impressed by it!

The characters were well done with good arc's and the performances from everyone was fantastic also. Only negative to this is that I feel Gary Oldman was hugely underused. He was hardly in it.

Overall, I think this is a very powerful film with a good message behind it. I would recommend to anyone to watch if they haven't already, just don't watch it expecting some huge war film. Because this isn't that.