Notre Dame on Fire

Apart from the very well done fire reenactments, I feel like I've been watching a slow amateur film with commercials for the Paris fire department. It's so poorly acted that I thought it was replayed by the firefighters themselves before I realized it wasn't.

Between the report and the reconstruction, the movie by Jean-Jacques Annaud is excellent. The only extra-production thing that makes a stain is that we collect hundreds of millions to rebuild what has been destroyed and we can't find a hundred cents to give to the unfortunate. A crazy world.

Based on the real 2019 Notre-Dame de Paris fire. A kind of Louis de Funes movie, but with firefighters, not gendarmes. Not very accurate, despite using some archive footage from the real events.

It shows the French as incompetent and out-of-reality people, lacking all interests about doing things properly. It intended to show the Paris Fire Brigade in a good light, as working hard heroes, but in fact it portrait them as slackers, a "fake it till you make it" command, more interested in being ultra religious, braving in a humoristic and ridiculous way.

A film comparable at most with hollywoodian disaster movies.

French TOWERING INFERNO, but nearly fifty years later and involving Notre Dame instead of a gigantic tower building. As far as I know, that's the only and first French disaster film ever made; but maybe I am wrong. I have seen only forty thousand films in my life. It is truly a masterpiece, Jean Jacques Annaud lost nothing of his talent, his awesome skills, forty years after LA GUERRE DU FEU. It's fire war - GUERRE DU FEU - again.... It's as awesome as his first epic, back in 1981, which was about another topic of course. It is great, accurate, providing thousands of details about this disaster. Everything you wished to know about it, you have here. Except maybe the real reasons of the fire. Accidental? Maybe. Maybe. But never forget that president Macron was in a bad position in April 2019, bad political position, because of the Yellow Jackets "revolution" that spread all over France. And this tragedy over Notre Dame was the best decoy for him, to "help" people forgetting for a long while the Yellow Jackets wrath. That's my own opinion. An accident? Maybe. Maybe.

On the one hand, it's very interesting how this film is almost devoid of a personal history or development of the characters. Also there is are no real main roles at all. On the other hand, it's what's missing to make it entertaining. So we see a lot of rescue workers who don't really know what to do, a city population that ignores and hinders the rescue workers and an 800 years old cathedral that almost burns down completely.

Not so exciting, because apart from the tragedy of the destruction, nothing special happens. No special event shown or a known reason is told for this catastrophy that answers our only question: why this happened? ... like in millions of other fires where old buildings simply start burning for seemingly no reason. But is this enough for a entertaining flick? I think not. Not if it's not artfully staged and it isn't. Sometimes you even think you're watching a B-movie.

A real documentary would have been more exciting than an entertainment film without a real story that doesn't know what it's supposed to be.