The New Official Movie Thread

[Minty]

After watching this rubbish, I can only conclude that Brad Pitt does this machismo overkill to compensate for being a poo actor with a small knob.

All the claims about this being as good as "Saving Private Ryan" are fiddlesticks & flapdoodle. It's as gory as it, but that's about it, some of the scenes reeking of trying too hard, such as the bit of a previous occupant's face inside the tank, or enemy soldiers being decapitated by passing tank shells, or stupidest of all, the guy having his leg amputated by a machine gun.

The GIs behave more like the ill disciplined rabble from Vietnam, the wimpy new recruit is a very bad Timmy Upham copy, & Brad Pitt's character is little more than a bully & a gung-ho asshat who can't even control his troops properly. Dick Winters he isn't, not even the infamous Ronald Speirs. Tank crews were disciplined to the point of being robotic - they had to be when their life expectancy was even lower than that of bomber crews & any breakdown of it or panic when underfire from one member could spell death for all the occupants.

The bit when Pitt forces himself into the house with the two cowering German women was pretty distasteful. Yeah, I get the subtext - you're supposed to think "oh he doesn't try to rape them, he only forces them to have dinner with him, that makes him a good guy after all". That one of them does get screwed by the wimpy guy with a slight hint that she does so in the hope the GIs won't brutalise them further leaves more than a bad taste in the mouth.

The big battle that marks the last half of the film is beyond ridicule. By April 1945, all GIs were taking far fewer risks knowing that the war was over bar the shouting & didn't want to get killed this close to the end. Not here. Their tank breaks down, there's a bunch of wandering Waffen SS coming over the hill (you know, the hardest, bestest, toughest, end of level bossest baddie soldiers in all Hollywood), Brad Pitt decides to stand & fight, telling the rest to go & hide until the enemy passes. One by one his crew refuse to leave him & save their skins. Pure cheese.

We see the Waffen SS soldiers approaching (& singing loudly, didn't the script writer know about the basic army regulations on maintaining noise discipline in a combat zone?) armed with anti-tank Panzerfausts. These have disappeared by the time they encounter the tank, only to be broken out of boxes later. The panzerfaust's claim to fame that it could blow up any tank in WW2 with one hit. Not here. In true Audie Murphy hokum style, somehow all but one of them manage to miss at point blank range & the one which does get through somehow doesn't kill everyone inside when it explodes (which in reality would have set off all the ammunition in the tank & resulted in turning everyone inside into something resembling a spagbol).

By the finish, all but one of the 5 GIs is dead & most of the 300 Germans wiped out. Yeah, by one immobile tank & five guys with machine guns & knives. Yes, it's the "nice guy" who survives, having been converted into a wimp into a Rambo unthinking killing machine, who even survives being spotted by a young Waffen SS soldier cowering under the tank at the very end. Had he been lying there passively unarmed, accepting it was Game Over, I could have swallowed that scene that the German moved on. Instead he's quivering with hands up - a red rag to a bull to any soldier that had just watched hundreds of his mates die. It also sits uncomfortably with the earlier scene where the GIs brutally treat a captured German after a battle before killing him.

Like that other dreadful Brad Pitt movie Inglourious Basterds, this is nothing more than meathead pornography dressed up as social commentary on what it means to be a soldier with characters shallower than a puddle.