Daniel Velandia COMM 3003 Research: Film Reviews

We Were Soldiers. Early Vietnam, Mission Murky By A. O. SCOTT The New York Times It is a truism that nobody hates war more than soldiers. ''We Were Soldiers,'' which chronicles a bloody three-day battle between the North Vietnamese Army and the United States Seventh Cavalry in November 1965, offers ample evidence of why this should be so. Following the example set by Steven Spielberg in ''Saving Private Ryan,'' Randall Wallace, who wrote and directed this square, effective combat epic, plunges us into the horrific chaos of close-range fighting. Bullets smash faces and rip through bellies inches from the camera, whose lens is occasionally smeared with blood. When the snap of gunfire and the thump of artillery momentarily fall silent, the air is filled with the moans of the wounded. But if ''We Were Soldiers'' treats war as a nightmare, it also insists on the honor and rectitude of the men who fight it, and on portraying their loyalty to one another in an almost romantic light. In a speech to his men on the eve of their departure for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) tells them they are leaving home and ''going to what home was always supposed to be.'' Given what will happen -- the men, badly outnumbered, will be overrun by enemy troops and suffer heavy casualties in the course of an ill-defined and dubious mission -- this seems like an astonishing statement. What he means is that, in the heat of battle, the men will look out for one another with a simple, unquestioning, sacrificial devotion stronger than the bonds of home or family. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9900E6DD1331F932A35750C0A964 9C8B63

'Saving Private Ryan': A Soberly Magnificent New War Film By JANET MASLIN The New York Times

When soldiers are killed in "Saving Private Ryan," their comrades carefully preserve any message he left behind. Removed from the corpses of the newly dead, sometimes copied over to hide bloodstains, these writings surely describe some of the fury of combat, the essence of spontaneous courage, the craving for solace, the bizarre routines of wartime existence, the deep loneliness of life on the brink.

Steven Spielberg's soberly magnificent new war film, the second such pinnacle in a career of magical versatility, has been made in the same spirit of urgent communication. It is the ultimate devastating letter home. Since the end of World War II and the virtual death of the western, the combat film has disintegrated into a showcase for swagger, cynicism, obscenely overblown violence and hollow, self-serving victories. Now, with stunning efficacy, Spielberg turns back the clock. He restores passion and meaning to the genre with such whirlwind force that he seems to reimagine it entirely, dazzling with the breadth and intensity of that imagination. No received notions, dramatic or ideological, intrude on this achievement. This film simply looks at war as if war had not been looked at before. Though the experience it recounts is grueling, the viscerally enthralling "Saving Private Ryan" is anything but. As he did in "Schindler's List," Spielberg uses his preternatural storytelling gifts to personalize the unimaginable, to create instantly empathetic characters and to hold an audience spellbound from the moment the action starts. Though the film essentially begins and ends with staggering, phenomenally agile battle sequences and contains isolated violent tragedies in between, its vision of combat is never allowed to grow numbing. Like the soldiers, viewers are made furiously alive to each new crisis and never free to rest. http://partners.nytimes.com/library/film/072498ryan-film-review.html

The Pianist: Surviving the Warsaw Ghetto Against Steep Odds By A. O. SCOTT The New York Times

Roman Polanski's new movie, "The Pianist," is based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a star of Polish radio and cafe society in the 1930's and a member of Warsaw's assimilated Jewish middle class, who lived through the Nazi occupation and the Warsaw ghetto. Szpilman's recollections, published shortly after the war, offer, like other such books, a deeply paradoxical impression of the Holocaust. Accounts of survival, that is, are both representative and anomalous; they at once record this all but unimaginable historical catastrophe and, without intentional mendacity or inaccuracy, distort it. The reason for this could not be simpler. Most of the intended victims of Nazi genocide did not survive; the typical Jewish experience in 1940's Europe was death. One of the main genres that allow later generations access to this time thus presents an inevitably unrepresentative picture of it.

We naturally identify with the protagonists of these books, and the characters based on them in movies and plays, and so imagine that we would have been among the lucky ones, even if the real odds suggest otherwise. (We also comfort ourselves in the vain belief that, had we been there, we would have bravely defied the Nazis, risking our own well-being to help their victims.) When it is not treated with the uneasy sentimentality reserved for miracles, survival whether through dumb luck, resilience, the kindness of strangers or some combination of these is often viewed with a deep and bitter sense of the absurd. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/movies/27PIAN.html

According to these film reviews, it is necessary to write a plot summary for the movie without reveal the ending. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to watch the movie at least twice in order to have a better understanding of it. When writing the review, it is good to include an overall reaction to the film as well as personal opinions on the quality of the film.