The Winter War
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Canada
Movie Reviews of The Winter War
Movie Review: Good Story, Lousy VHS Tape and unfortunately DVD
Summary: 2 Stars
The story of Finland's resistance and stalemate against Russia is a true story and the film does justice to the story. Unfortunately, the quality of the VHS tape is terrible - fuzzy, grainy,distorted. Like the poor quality you would get from a multiple generation copied home video that was the final copy of all the generational copies made (copy of a copy of a copy, etc.). What is really unfortunate is the DVD is equally bad, apparently just a DVD copy of the already bad VHS tape. The Belle & Blade Studios who market the VHS/DVD did a real dis-service to everyone who buys the product.The action scenes and story line is above average and at times can be truly gut-wrenching. The sub-titles are frequently in rather bad or garbled English (the film is in Finnish)and were obviously translated by a person who had poor command of the English language. The sub-titles cannot be disabled as they are part of the film. I just wish the VHS/DVD copy was better in quality - I can put up with the sub-titles.
Movie Review: Only for the most forgiving viewer
Summary: 1 Stars
I've seen many, many war movies over the years, and as much as I was looking forward to this one, The Winter War turned out to be one of the worst war films I've ever seen. This film does have two important things going for it: it's one of the only movies about this conflict that you're likely to see, and it features extensive and graphic big-budget combat scenes. The movie pulls no punches about the nastiness of war. Unfortunately, this film has so many huge problems that it can only be recommended to extremely forgiving viewers with a particular interest in this conflict. First of all, the story is remarkably flimsy; it's really just a very loose framework on which to hang a bunch of numbingly repetitive battle scenes. Some grognards (fanatical war buffs, basically) rave about this movie because of its battle scenes. Sure, they're graphic and have lots of explosions, but when they're so poorly written, directed, and edited, who cares? Don't expect to find anything as masterly filmed or emotionally intense as the openings of Saving Private Ryan or Enemy at the Gates, for example. Meanwhile, characters, themes, and plot twists are never fleshed out or are simply nonexistent.
Just as bad, the directing and editing are literally some of the worst I've ever seen in a feature film: jerky or downright incoherent cuts between shots and scenes are more the norm than the exception. These affect not merely the combat scenes, but the whole film. The Winter War looks downright amateurish much of the time. (Other reviewers claim that much material has been deleted for this DVD release, and it sure looks that way!) Also, the acting is merely acceptable here, which makes it that much harder to care about any of the characters and whether they live or die. On top of that, the subtitles are poorly handled: they're littered with grammatical and spelling errors. Finally, the DVD transfer looks like it came from some third-generation video tape.
If you're looking for a modern, realistic WWII film on DVD, you'd do far better with the Band of Brothers miniseries, Saving Private Ryan, Das Boot, The Thin Red Line, Stalingrad, or Enemy at the Gates, for example. Those all feature far better writing, acting, direction, editing, and/or cinematography. Those are films that both grognards and film buffs can enjoy.
For those who just want to gawk at some early-war Soviet tanks and trench warfare, The Winter War might be of interest, but that sure doesn't make it a good film. Hopefully the film will be released properly some day, so we can judge the real thing instead of this mess of a movie.
Movie Review: Very interesting pic, abysmal DVD from Belle and Blade
Summary: 1 Stars
To make it short: The picture is very interesting, a must see for every war movie fan. Especially the fighting on the huge-scale sets including vintage russian armour (even a flamethrower tank is roaming the battlefield!) is VERY impressive.However, the DVD edition from a company or label "Belle and Blade" is one of the worst I have ever seen. The picture quality is sub-VHS Standard, the sound in a flat stereo, the english subtitles are totally oversized and not removable, there are no extras at all - in one word, you'll get pure... for your hard-earned Euros (or Dollars). What a pity, the picture has deserved a decent relaese.
So, for the movie itself, I would say 4 out of 5 stars, for the DVD: None at all and a beating for the guys who are responsible for this mess...