Turin_Horse

Indescribably bad, ridiculous to the very last detail, unrealistic to the point of absurdity, unbearably cheesy. I can see just one positive point in this film, if someone is interested in knowing what the aftermath of a nuclear attack would NEVER be like then this film is for you. Well, and seeing Kevin Costner and Rebecca de Mornay for a few minutes on screen (although playing as ludicrous roles as the rest of the cast) might also satisfy some.

Many here compare positively this film to Threads and The Day After... I suppose you are joking, right?. These two films are orders of magnitude more realistic, better done, acted and produced than this sad Testament. Anyway the best post-nuclear apocalyptic film is not either of these two actually; watch Dead Man's Letters, a Russian 1986 Konstantin Lopushanskiy's film and judge by yourself.

Many of the comments claim that the film does not pretend to give a realistic account of a post-nuclear Armageddon but just show the psycological and social effects on the life of a community and a family... Yeah, that's obvious, but I cannot think of a more cheesy and clumsy way to depict this. I think the makers of this film did not just lack any knowledge whatsoever on what the effects of a nuclear attack would be like, but also on how the human psyche works at the most very basic level; the script of this film seems to have been written by someone below an age of 12.

Summarizing, a terrible experience, once you get to the final scene you wish the nuke would have exploded right in the middle of the village and thus the film would have lasted just 10 min.

Probably no other sequel in cinema history has so completely turned upside-down the spirit and true meaning of the original film. While First Blood presented an interesting variation of the well-known returned-from-Vietnam character who has been shown in many films, with a pathetic side yet willing and able to fight back when pushed around, Rambo II shows us a sort of reborn superhero who will bring justice to the aggrieved and ruthless punishment for the culprits.

First Blood can play in the same league as The Deer Hunter or Born on the Fourth of July (being, notwithstanding, inferior to these two). Rambo II cannot play in any league aimed for decent films. Leaving aside the campy acting by most of the cast and the laughable characterization of Mexican soldiers as Vietnamese, the main problem with the film is that it takes a well-crafted character from a previous film and turns him into something completely different, bluntly breaching the spirit of First Blood and creating a new scenario fully detached from the original one.

The subsequent sequels (I only watch parts of Rambo III) seemingly follow the same path. A pity, since First Blood could have remained a good example on the topic of unadaptability on returning to homeland, with the additional pull of setting the scenario in a remote deep America location and the clash between the locals and the wandering hero (antihero actually in this case).

So, we have an Australian superhero who, being a humble peasant and family man in his homeland travels to Turkey in the years after WWI in search for his disappeared sons, and once there he manages to: 1) get to the place of the Gallipoli battle and find the exact place where two of his sons were killed and lie under ground, all thanks to the seeming extrasensorial faculties he possesses, 2) again with some extrasensorial help (intuition will say some...) find his third son alive in a remote village, 3) allow the escape of a foe-turned-friend Turkish military official from a fully armed squad of Greek soldiers using a wicket to fight them, and 4) beat up a group of members of a Turkish family clan one of whose members had been previously insulted by our protagonist (this time he was barehanded and the ones using sticks were the rivals).

Why the surviving son never returned home when he was not badly injured or affected in his mental faculties after the battle (and is now living a miserable life in a small remote village) is not coherently explained, being this the triggering point of a family tragedy that prompted the trip of the protagonist.

Apart from all this... pretty photography in evocative sepia colors, a ravishing Olga Kurylenko playing a Turkish widow soon-to-marry as second wife a rich man (but making googly eyes to our hero now and then), and a playful smart boy intermingling occasionally in the story, may keep you mildly entertained if you do not take the story too seriously.