16/100

Perhaps I shouldn't dislike this as much as I do since it's a woefully inoffensive film, but that's precisely the problem. As time passes, it seems easier and easier to get away with saying nothing and bringing nothing new to the table. You watch this and the only possible takeaway is "war is bad" — who was arguing otherwise? What else is there? The inhumanity of governmental structures in the midst of conflict? Okay, where are we going here? The politics, ideas, meaning, and emotional weight all start and end within the first two minutes; they never change, elaborate, grow in complexity, or do anything whatsoever. It's a mechanical work, one that retreads ground so thoroughly fleshed out that an A.I. could generate a more insightful work. Look at the craft here too; I see praise for the image-crafting, but watching it all I see is a few shots designed to look pretty (oh look, there's a sunset!) and a few to show how horrifying the scale of war (oh look, bodies on a battlefield!), and, honestly, that's the high point of the movie, the score is beyond unforgivable in my eyes, music that has exactly two tones: a droning sound to lay out that This Is Scary, and a melancholy one for when people die. If this were a true anti-war film there would be faces we could see and care for, but the bodies on the screen are all as empty as the writers who created them — I couldn't tell you one thing about a single character in this, and they (the writers) put in work to pretend they care for their subjects, but all that work is a copy of a copy; oh look, there's a garment to remember a woman by, oh look, there's a piece of a poster they took because it has a pretty woman on it. Its identity has been borrowed from a thousand films before it which contain the weight this one pretends to, which suggests they didn't even bother to pay attention to the work they were copying off it. An empty husk of a film.