5 Days of War

Well, all kinds of things went wrong with this movie.

For starters, the opening sequence is awesome. One thing this movie really had was best camera crew ever. Everything feels very intense all the times, very close to the real war footage. Also, all the props, vehicles, uniforms, even explosions look very real. This is the good part.

The mediocre part is main story. It's a mix of Hotel Rwanda and Tears of the Sun, but feels like a bootleg version, a cheap knockoff of those.

And then there's the bad part. Just after awesome intro, you get "treated" with shots of Tbilisi, with landmarks, people smiling, and god forbid, trancey music in the background. It looked like a commercial for some travel agency, with only "Visit Georgia" message missing from the scene and was most tasteless thing I've ever seen in a film. I live in similar post-soviet country and I do understand the mentality in desperate desire to explain your culture to the world to get less looked as some remote hellhole, but this is outright tasteless and maybe Georgia hasn't come to this yet.

The script had generally no direction. Awesome war scene here, some corpses there, cameramen and photography director knew what to do... But director didn't. First, that simple shot with church and bloody river from 'Tears of the Sun' gives 10 times stronger emotion than whole pile of bodies shown in '5 days of August'. Even though latter tries sooo hard to portray Russians as savages.

Second, despite awesome camera and props, fighting had no point in this movie. You see soldiers shooting stuff and each other, but it's unclear why or what's their plan. I don't think any people who had any idea about how soldiers and military works were on the set. Mi-24 choppers shooting random buildings with rockets? And here I thought that every pilot is given orders and targets to waste expensive munitions on... Also, MI-24 sports a deadly cannon, but it's used only once, missing everything, and soldiers act as chopper had blind men for pilot and gunner, not taking cover. Tanks constantly missing targets and not using machine guns? Taking down a chopper with a single LAW rocket? SU-bombers taking down a restaurant residing in basically nowhere? This all felt very bizarre and pointless.

I could go on, but there's no need. Let's just say that this movie is very average, has some good moments, lots of unmemorable moments, and some outright stupid ones. So pick it up from bargain bin, but don't expect too much.

6 stars I give are for 2 reasons: Awesome camera work (it felt like live action at places) and the fact that despite being incredibly dumb, this movie IS entertaining... and that's good, even if it's for all wrong reasons.

...as for amount of propaganda, this movie is 100% okay, considering what comes from Moscow. Sure it's all bloated and overrated but this is how we rock in those former USSR satellite countries. Even 50 of such movies can't counter a single evening news show from random Russian TV-channel. For westerners, you just have to accept that rules are different, but watching all those Normandy landings in every Hollywood movie and video game, maybe not as much as you might think.

Its not propaganda, its sad that russians hate themselfs that much that they give 1 star to the truth, like chernobyl. 1 Stars becouse they bealive that russian propaganda.

I recognize, I will be subjectively. my ancestors are Georgians and the impression about that war was powerful. so, I love this movie. not very much but it is good price for the ambiguous speech of E.U., U.S.A. in the days of Russian aggression. the Olimpic Games were more important than massacres and cynical experiment of Moscow. yes, it is a propaganda film, not very inspired,naive, some stupid, unrealistic and full of American dusty recipes. an interesting script is prey of special effects. Manicheic rule is not best solution. but , more that, it is a lesson about Georgia existence. crumbs from Cold War, drops of friendship and heroism, cruelty in pure form, pieces of fake moments are ingredients of movie but not its essence. the American style to present fight of David against Goliath is only cloth for a profound story about hidden monsters. in fact, a cry of a lost world for who history is just bad wolf out of rules.

the only reason i am giving this film a 5 is mainly due to the action. The action was incredibly choreographed and excellent special effects. Great Cinematography.

Now, the story, plot, acting, writing, historical accuracy,.....all crap. it was horribly inaccurate and biased toward the Georgians, who actually started the war. it was basically a big fat Georgian propaganda film. both sides committed atrocities in this horrible 5 day war. it wasn't good guy vs bad guy, it was bad guy vs bad guy. If the writers and Director had done any research, they'd know all of this.

next, the story, plot, and writing. the story is just badly planned out, and doesn't really show any background,....mainly due to the fact that this is a huge propaganda Georgia film. The plot was plain and predictable. So, that really made me not enjoy this film. The writing was pretty p_i_s_s_ poor. No background story, the lines were stiff and just not emotional at all.

acting was bad, but not horrendous. I have seen much much worse.

all in all, this movie could have been one amazing work of art and story telling, but they got too focused on the money, which they obviously failed miserably at: $12,000,000 budget, only got $60,000 in the box office. So yeah, overall just a good one time watch when you are ridiculously bored out of your mind

This film reminds me of Renny Harlin's breakthrough film from 1985, Born American. The scripts are lacking in both movies, but action sequences are well made and the propaganda aspects are similar. It's no secret that these films have a heavy anti-Soviet/Russian agenda, and actually as a Finn myself, I greatly enjoy that Harlin has the b*lls to p*ss of the Russians. His 1985 movie was especially gutsy considering that it was BANNED in Finland for a short while! (The government didn't want to endanger Soviet relations.)

So it's not a neutral movie, but it doesn't need to be. Somebody had to do it, and Harlin was the perfect man for the job. Russians have their own biased movies of this war, so a counterbalance was needed, and I'm sure "5 Days of War" beats the Russian movies by far in entertainment value, and will be seen by millions more.