AlfredAngier’s review published on Letterboxd:
I feel like I've typed these words a lot over the 2023 Oscar season but: This film did not need to be so long.
It was very effective in showing how war is made up of moments of sheer terror mixed with long stretches of boredom because the sequences of battle from the random violence to how most of the soldiers were scared boys, killed before they could live were horrific to watch. But the sequences of life between the fights were tedious as a viewer and felt repetitive. I think they were used well but after an hour and a half I felt like the point was made and it didn't need to force my face in the mud with what it was trying to say anymore. War is hell, the people who start wars are almost never the ones who pay the price for it and yet we still can't seem to learn tha lesson despite there being so many war films that tell that same moral again and again.
Brilliant on pretty much every technical scale one could use from the acting to cinematography to direction and if this were an hour and forty minute film it would have been excellent. Instead I was bored by the time the final shot rolled around when I should have been weeping at the experience.
Added to my 2023 Oscar Nominees list
