The Trench
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Movie Reviews of The Trench
Movie Review: The Trench
Summary: 4 Stars
This is an excellent movie for World War I buffs. Why? For one reason, there is little enough out there for the amateur historian of this period, and the depictions and language exchange are useful to understand trench warfare. This is not about character development to the ultimate degree. This is about a snapshot of history, and it is well done, for what it set out to achieve. And the price is right. Buy it, now.Several things are lacking, like the dry trenches (never happen) and the clean uniforms (Britain had been in the war for two years), but perfection would make it five stars, rather than four.
Jim Minnoch
Movie Review: The Trench
Summary: 4 Stars
Another addition to my collection and another depiction of what trench warfare must of been like!Movie Review: for what it is, it was pretty good
Summary: 3 Stars
Reading the other reviews here, I had to post one myself to defend it. The movie has its problems, but some of the complaints are unjustified.
To say the ending was a rip-off of some other war movie is just silly -- how else could it have ended? This was the Somme. You don't make a movie about the first day of the Somme if you want anything other than a massacre.
To the person complaining about No Man's Land being a grassy meadow. There was a place called Serre where the attacking British DID cross a grassy meadow. The grass was so long, as the wounded men fell, some of the others thought there'd been an order to get down, and so they did too, only to find the others wounded or dead.
To the guy complaining about the lack of homoerotic content, all I can say is, oh well. Not everything's always about sex.
Movies about battles like this, you can look at from a big picture perspective or you can zoom in for a close look at a group of individuals. This movie goes for the close-up. It's not trying to be anything else. This is a movie about the strain of the long hours waiting for a major offensive to begin, for a bunch of young guys, most of whom were new to the war. It's dumb to criticize it for failing to be something else. I thought it did a pretty good job of portraying the situation. The boredom, the fear, how difficult it would be to sleep or eat or turn off your brain during those long hours. The ways the men might snipe at one another over little things due to frayed nerves. The relationship between the men, the sergeant and the lieutenant was subtle but I think well-done.
My complaints are that it goes about a half hour too long. The trench looked mighty tidy to me too. I had trouble believing that a shell big enough to blow 2 men to bits wouldn't have done more damage to the structure of the trench there.
Also most of these guys would have known each other from civilian life; the British army had a lot of "Pals Battalions" where guys from the same village or area joined up and served together. Most of these guys should have known one another.
I am pretty sure I saw a guy light a cigarette with a Bic-type lighter and I'm pretty sure they would not have had something like that.
I think for a look at "trench life" for a bunch of newbies about to go over the top for the first time, it was pretty good.
Movie Review: Slice of life; doom without much homomasculine drama
Summary: 3 Stars
This movie seemed like a filmed stage play from an off-Broadway experimental theater in the 1960s. This does not mean it is a bad drama, but that its classical unities of time, place, and action are theatrical rather than filmic. The characters are the same stock characters always found in war movies from "All Quiet on the Western Front" to "Platoon." In fact, one of its sniper scenes is straight out of the last scene in "All Quiet."
This does not mean it is bad so much as it means that without explosive action the military genre becomes a talkfest--in this case between teenagers who don't know each other and therefore have not much to say. In the 60s, plays like this cozied up to homosexuality, which "Trench" fails to do, even though the film stars gay icon Daniel Craig who is the calling card in the cast.
[...]
Anyway, this mise en scene happens years after Walt Whitman and his revealing Calamus soldier poems, and a few years after "Mrs. Dalloway" and "Gods and Monsters" did "takes" on gay men fighting WWI.
Also we are now in, hello, the 21st century when the love that dare not speak its name fairly shouts and it's time to present the unspoken past of WWI and its buried soldier-lovers. Such a tactic would, at least, have given the plotless plot some edge. If same-period "Maurice" could show same-sex lovers, then why not uncloset these lives in the trenches? These homomasculine buddy-buddy war stories of chums who enlist together, train together, fight together, die together are coming even out of Iraq.
As presented, the film channels all of its anxieties about love and death and comradeship into huge amounts of smoking where inhaling means one thing and exhaling means another and lighting a match means everything. If this had been a non-smoking "Trench," there would have been no stage business at all.
The whole film is lensed in a virtual general shot. Too bad. Some close-ups would have helped, particularly of Daniel Craig, whose eyes deserve two Academy Awards.
All in all, if you like theater, you may enjoy the one-dimensial "Trench," but accept it for what it is. Don't fault it because it is not a high-budget action film. For fun, do a double feature of "Trench" with "Lafayette Escadrille" which is also a little known WWI film full of very handsome, very blond men.
Movie Review: TRENCH
Summary: 3 Stars
Daniel Craig gives another great performance in this historical drama. I found the cockney accents a little difficult to understand at times, but all the young actors are strong in showing their naievete and being scared in war. Theres a doom that hangs over the story that you just know things are not going to turn out well. And then one bad thing happens after the other....But a soldier does what he must do. Very heartbreaking.
I also enjoyed the history lesson as I was not familiar with this episode of British war time.