Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers

The master plan for the invasion of Nazi-occupied France calls for a small group of pathfinders to set up radio beacons in order to guide the airborne assault. For reasons unknown, the Allied command decides that this mission is to be entrusted to a sorry bunch of third-rate soldiers gathered haphazardly from various units, hence the title "in the company of strangers". Fortunately, the German opposition is made up of utterly incompetent reservists with no combat experience whatsoever.

This movie might have been better as a comedy. A major and a captain discuss the details of the upcoming invasion in a pub! A member of the super-secret pathfinder force visits his girlfriend the day before D-Day! Paratrooper tells funny story involving explosive vomiting!

Not to mention -- weird colors, giving a subtle air of authenticity (or that's what the cinematographer thought, anyway) -- flat dialog -- flat delivery -- and flat combat scenes. Plus, for the true connoisseur, we show an English house in the 1940s with thermopane windows! and an American post-and-rail fence in Normandy!

Don't bother.

I like a good war film and this is not a good war film. Awful close ups all the time. They should be used for dramatic effect not in every scene or cutaway. Terrible sound as if recorded in a toilet. This was shot on 35mm? What a waste. Civilian period costumes awful. The English country house? Obviously set in in USA. We did not have double glazed front doors, Lelandi firs, and a totally terrible period interior. Dialogue lacked lustre and to be quite honest I didn't care what they said after an hour of meaningless trite dialogue.Acting from the school of bad acting.Fast pace? What movie were you watching? Lighting done with a forty watt bulb and at other times with a exterior floodlight from the Home Depot. The locations were a joke. Have you ever been to Normandy or even researched the locations? They don't have a re-occurring picket fence and country paths but high hedgerows and flat plains. It looked as if it was all filmed on someones country estate. As for the largest exterior set used in a low budget film, I would ask for a refund. Didn't you you do any research yet again. I note the DOP is not mentioned in the enormous credit list. I take it he was too ashamed to put his name to it. Everything was seriously flawed in one way or another and I could go on and on but I have wasted enough time on this already. Why did I give it a 2? The aeroplanes, you could have made more of them.

I wanted to like this movie, but I'm afraid I just couldn't - sorry. Here are my main faults.

1) Film-makers -here's a tip - the CLOSE-UP can be an effective tool in story telling, BUT if you ONLY use close ups and never any other angles, it just ends up feeling like you are trapped in a cardboard box with the actors.

2) The lighting - TOO DARK. I had to adjust the settings on my TV to make out the action and in the end I just couldn't tell who the different characters were. Which brings me to....

3) Characters - except for 3 or 4 guys I just didn't know who was who. There was not enough time spent developing any personalities before we head off to France and.....

4) France - and particularly Normandy. Had anyone involved in the film ever been to Normandy? The roads, fields and countryside used for filming look NOTHING like Normandy and what was with that brand new American style wooden fence. There is NOTHING like that in Normandy.

5) Acting - Now I know that I shouldn't expect Matt Damon and other A-listers in every film. But where did they find this lot? Bar a couple of exceptions they were all awful. Surely there are college actors out there who don't sound like they are reading everything off idiot boards? As I say, I wanted to like this film, I know some of the guys who were filmed jumping and others involved in the original concept. But, this truly is a piece of garbage. Well intended perhaps - but a piece of garbage nonetheless.

Sorry

*Lousy acting (lots of unnecessary emoting) *Awful sound (muddled in parts, unnaturally sparse in others) *Questionable historical sets/settings (is that even France?) *No directing (everything is in close up!) *Laughable dialog ("Why, you're as ugly as soup!!") *Even the soundtrack is the wrong era (retro big band music??!).

This is just a bad community college play captured on film.

If this movie cost $50, someone spent $40 of it on hookers for the crew.

I understand that this is an Indy film and all, but come on, they made decent war movies in the 50s and 60s with small budgets on the back lot. Why can't these folks (in 2011) come up with at least a watchable film about such an important story?

Three companies of paratroopers travel in a deadly mission to France to prepare the drop zone for the airborne attack on the D-Day. They have to install an Eureka transmitter and searchlight to guide the planes in the Normandy invasion.

"Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers" is a dreadful and lame war movie - maybe the worst I have ever seen. The "untold and lost story" is disrespectful with the true Normandy invasion and the screenplay is awful without character development and poor dialogs. The direction is also awful with permanent close up camera and terrible soundtrack of machine gun all the time. The acting is ridiculously amateurish. The "battle scenes" are so fake and there is one particularly corny scene, when the German soldier throws a grenade in the trench, one paratrooper shows it to the others and uses his body to contain the explosion instead of throwing it back. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Desbravadores: Na Companhia de Estranhos" ("Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers")

Note: On 20 March 2021, I saw this film again.