hypersonic8999

When it comes to WW2 movies, I've probably seen most of them. Not just Hollywood, but Russian, British, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Australian, Chinese, Greek, etc.

This one is nothing to write home about. You can have a good time for the 2 hours it lasts, although it's a bit too drawn-out. By the end of it, you'll forget what it's all about.

The story never really draws you in. The 3 storylines are too far apart from each other, and the jumps between them never really give you the time to immerse yourself in the story or get to know the characters. The way the film is edited also ruins pacing. Things take quite a while to resolve themselves, and by the time they do, you have either forgotten about them or got caught up in other things. As a result, there's barely any emotional impact on the audience.

The plot doesn't give the characters enough depth. As a result the performances come across as a bit wooden, even though the actors seem competent enough to pull off a major production like this.

The story doesn't do anything really original, and doesn't do enough to be apart from other "serendipity" kind of films or films about German occupation. Frankly, I caught myself often thinking back on Black Book (an excellent Dutch WW2 resistance film) and comparing it to this one. Black Book is superior by far.

The film is just too long and too slow for its own good. And I'm not talking about lack of action. You can have good war films with barely any action in them. The problem is that the weaknesses I mentioned become more apparent the longer a film is. If this film was 30-40 minutes shorter, it would have a more compact and better paced story, the vision and the premise would have been given a better chance to shine, and it would have been a lot fairer to the actors' talents.

The director, editor and screenwriter all fail to deliver suspense where it was needed. There's many scenes where characters are about to die and the film might as well have been describing the weather.

In fact, if I was in charge of this, I would have cut the glider pilot's storyline out all together. It's completely irrelevant to the other 2 stories and it leads nowhere beyond a minor tie-in at the end. The ending could have easily been the same without this entire storyline. The storyline itself has an interesting premise. It would have served the entire project, if it was instead turned into a separate film. As it is, it serves no purpose to the plot of this film.

Summary: Decent acting, average direction, a plot with pacing issues and shallow characters but otherwise OK, subpar editing. I don't know where all these 8, 9 and 10 reviews are coming from. It's watchable, even enjoyable, but doesn't really rise above mediocrity.

This is a pretty great WW2 series. I really enjoyed it. Good story, good acting, good characters. People complain about the animation filter, but it's not that big of a deal. It could have been done better at certain points, but all in all, it doesn't take anything away.