The one-take war.

War! Huah! Good God y’all! What is it good for?! Absolutely Oscar!

GALLIPOLI meets SAVING PRIVATE RYAN in the Newest Generation’s gritty war film, “1917.” (The year people started to realize Archduke Ferdinand probably wasn’t worth all this bone and blood sausage.)

World War I (a rare topic, as most modern war movies cover WWII onwards). Two young British soldiers are empowered to cross enemy German territory to deliver a message that will save 1,600 British soldiers from walking into an ambush. Without the help of Wonder Woman.

Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, GAME OF THRONES) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay, CAPTAIN FANTASTIC) are the two men, nay boys, chosen by the General (Colin Firth) because Blake’s older brother is in the battalion that needs the warning. Schofield is along because he happened to be napping near Blake when they came for him. (Closet homosexual Mike Pence warns: “See? Don’t get pulled into war by sleeping with other men.”)

Directed by Sam Mendes (SPECTRE), 1917 is made to look like it was filmed in one take. A roving camera follows the boys from their nap in the field, to the end of their journey, without once leaving their side. Of course it’s not “one take” but due to the meticulous creative magic of Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins (THE BIG LEBOWSKI, JARHEAD, BLADE RUNNER 2049), it damn well looks it. You can be a killjoy and find the cuts amongst the long, long takes (what the filmmakers call “blend points”), but Deaky isn’t gonna be giving back his Oscar any time soon.

Movie opens on a field of yellow flowers, (not unlike the last scene of the BLACKADDER saga where the WWI trench massacre cross-faded into just such a field, growing where the dead lay), then pulls back to reveal two sleeping soldiers, Blake (Seth McFarlane Short?) and Schofield (Anders from WORKAHOLICS?); awakened and summoned by the General, the camera pulling back and leading as they walk-and-talk, never leaving them, in medium shot, no cutaways, no inserts, as the mise en scène opens up behind them: a tableau of soldiers in the grassy expanse, resting, washing clothes, cooking, milling aimlessly, camera still pulling backwards as they enter a shallow trench, whose sides gradually grow to over 10 feet high, as they ponder the nature of their summons, soldiers passing them; we see “street signs” to differentiate the endless canyons of mud-walled, boarded trench, wires snaking along the walls, sandbags, rifles, blankets, helmets, poles, rags, muck… we did not even realize the imperceptible morph from flowers in fields to wet mud and dried blood. This opening shot alone is over 9 minutes long, one take, and “ends” with Blake and Schofield entering the General’s dugout…

But it doesn’t end. Camera has followed them into the dark and is now continuing filming what would ordinarily be, in any other movie, another scene. Then it follows them out again… (Mention must go to the somberness of Firth’s General. Star power like Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch will also make grim cameos, but are definitely not the pillars that this movie need rest on. The main event is stolen outright by George MacKay as Schofield)… No Man’s Land depicted in garish hellishness, the horizon-stretching mud, blasted earth, bloated horse carcasses, gunmetal sky, barbed wire, which Schofield would cut himself on… (the horrific realism of that tiny cut; it’s small, but it’s there, bothering him every time he puts that hand out to grasp something)… Blake and Schofield ultimately making – the German trenches!… Into the German tunnels… deserted bunks and hefty rats, pitch-black – tripwire – booby-trap…

This one-take approach is not as stultifying as we might imagine, as the camera is free to roam far from our protagonists; we see them in long shot if they skirt a muddy, body-filled trench, or wander across a blasted hillock; the name of the game is to just have eyes on at least Blake or Schofield or both at all times. The filmmakers created trusses and ziplines and truck-mounts to extend the camera’s freedom of movement, but for us viewers the single shot creates a sense of claustrophobic dread, as if we have no peripheral vision, as if there is something fatal just around the next broken outpost. And then, in the most benign, unimaginable manner, that fatality comes from open skies…

1917 does not romanticize war: rats eating flesh, body parts rotting, even Blake’s and Schofield’s slow, crouching advance across deserted throughways reveals so much abomination caused by warring humans; the worst abomination of all – the paranoia and distrust of human toward human. Every time they encounter an enemy soldier, we feel that since they are only two lone soldiers, maybe there is some spark of humanity that will allow both parties to pass each other unmolested, if neither initiates attack – but no. Every enemy soldier is just that – an enemy, hellbent on killing Brits by any means possible.

Title card tells us it’s April 6^th, 1917. It is never brought up in the movie, and it would only matter to history buffs – it’s the date America “officially” entered World War I. Funny they should be so specific, because this tale is not based on any specific event or person(s), rather a composite of war tales Lance Corporal Alfred H. Mendez told his grandson Sam, who would grow up to be this movie’s co-writer/director. There is no scope of the grander picture of the war, or the politics behind the Austria-Hungary conflict with Serbia that brought in Germany and Russia – nothing except that one message that needs to get through.

Surely the most amazing aspect of this production is a basic film-school principle that is completely ignored here, that is, that every camera move must have a start point and an end point. Yet from the moment he turns it on, Mendes’s camera has no end point! It’s in a constant dance to the very end of the film! Another incredible production aspect: when our boys walk for long distances through trenches, we never see a repeated stretch of trench – those trenches have actually been dug into the English countryside (Bovingdon Airfield), over 5,200 feet of them, for maximum walk-and-talk amaze-balls. Steven Spielberg changed the game when he authentically recreated the Normandy invasion exactly how we imagined it to be; now Mendes changes the game in the most authentic trench warfare recreation ever committed to film; even more brutal than we imagined it to be.

The realism is not just reflected in the muck and murder (biplanes dogfighting in the distance, a plane crashing in our vicinity, a knife-stab, buildings burning and flares winding down through the shifting shadows), there are innocuous details, like an Indian Sikh soldier nonchalantly amongst the whiteboys in the back of a troop transport. Representation for what was a large percentage of other-ethnicity troops amongst the British soldiery (just like America’s ranks in wars were swelled by African-Americans, Latinos, Polish, Asians, you-name-the-Others). Guess we can now call 1917 a “revisionist” war movie – for that crazy reason that it’s actually portraying reality rather than the whitewashed version we’ve been milk-fed the last 100 years.

The movie utilizes ambient daylight to light its mostly-outdoor shots (so the crew were always waiting around for the clouds to cover the sky – not too long a wait in England), with the burning building sequence lighting itself with the actual flames – cinematically masterful, the raging immolation of the village creating literal roaring beauty.

Schofield finds a short respite in this village; an interlude in an abandoned cellar, with a fearful French woman and a child that is not hers. Our rom-com hearts come out to flutter, as we wish with all our might that Schofield would just stop here, with this beautiful dirty blond imploring him to stay, giving her solace and help and, of course, man-love. But there is that damned message, and the only human gesture Schofield can afford is to bequeath her the milk he collected earlier from a cow. To truly prove his worth as a man, we know he needs to desert her.

There could have been just the message, but that added impetus of Blake’s brother would tug at the heartstrings in the film’s final emotional scenes.

And he shall run. He shall run like the hounds of hell are on his heels and all life hangs in the balance. Because at the end of that run… unlimited chicks.

1917’s forward momentum would come to a kinetic climax in Schofield’s end-run. All stealth thrown to the winds, with minutes to spare – Schofield runs toward the bunkered officer who can call off the Allied charge into ambush. And it is so inspiring because he is NOT running from danger, NOT running to save himself; he runs to save the lives of thousands, his mate’s brother among them. He’s fulfilling not just an order, but a vow. Like Jefferson’s chest-beating end-run in THE DIRTY DOZEN, like Mel’s final sprint filled with dread in GALLIPOLI, Schofield gives it more than his human frame can bear, plowing across the line of rabid soldiers going over-the-top, as shells rend the earth around him, knocked down, recover, knocked down again, recover. Run. RUN!…

… Like an exhausted bookend, Schofield closes his eyes, and Mendes’s camera finds its end-point… on a field of flowers.

Not everyone could be saved – but the message got through. We hear that message, time and again, over the last century, but no one’s paying attention:

War! Huah! Good God y’all! What is it good for?! Absolutely nothin’!

But as long as it’s good for a few Oscars, I’m sure it’ll keep happening.

END

War is only as stupid as its combatants.

Avril Lavigne called: she said thanks for the tips on makeup and posing.

Too soon? A comedy set during World War I – during World War I.

Long before Rambo won Viet Nam, Charlie Chaplin won WWI! Writer-director-star Chaplin, the king of physical comedy, addresses the greatest comedy of all – war. Braving public disapproval, he releases SHOULDER ARMS, a breezy lark that follows a Doughboy (Chaplin) through boot camp, trench warfare and combat as a tree (!), one month before the end of World War I. It was a hit.

No wonder. SHOULDER ARMS is not a political statement, just a fantasy of how one scatterbrain British doughboy ends up capturing the German Kaiser himself (played by Chaplin’s real-life brother Sydney) and ending the war. Americans just eat that propaganda for breakfast.

In between vignettes that feature Doughboy trying to march in rank, trying to sleep in neck deep flooding, making a life for himself in the trenches by using the enemy’s sniper fire to uncork wine bottles, being a sniper himself, and going undercover to capture the Kaiser, there are broad digs at the German infantry. Every German soldier is made up to look as ugly as humanly possible, and boy are they dumb! And the German troop that Doughboy captures are a gaggle of gentle giants with a malicious dwarf as their commander.

When Doughboy is dressed like a tree, he oddly resembles Gumby. Edna Purviance is The Girl whom Doughboy rescues from the clutches of the evil Germans.

Yes, Germans = evil. And dumb. No argument from the censors or the audience, all geared – as were their enemies – to regard their opposing side in war as less-than-human.

At the end of the short (running time: 45 mins), two soldiers shake Doughboy awake in his tent… Wait– his trials and successes were all a dream? It may seem like a total gyp (was this the first time the Patrick Duffy Shower Scene was shoehorned into a movie?), but Chaplin may just be saying, the only way to rid ourselves of war is to shake ourselves awake. Message too soon? Or perfectly timed with the end of the war?

END

All quiet when it comes to war.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is arguably the first true anti-war film. An American production that follows a young German soldier through senseless World War I trenches, it is epic in scope, yet intimate in its emotional impact.

There were others that flew the flag of anti-war – CIVILIZATION (1916), J’ACCUSE (1919), THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1921) – yet none were as literal or forceful as ALL QUIET, which won the 1930 Best Picture Oscar.

From a book by German Erich Maria Remarque outlining his experiences in WWI, director Lewis Milestone crafts a parable of horror that the human species still hasn’t learned from. Following the fortunes of young German high school boy Paul (Lew Ayres), movie takes us through the rhetoric of the marketers (“You are the life of the Fatherland! You are the iron men of Germany!”), the camaraderie of training camp, the outright fear and futility of the front lines, the isolation of hospital, the alienation of returning home, then the ultimate pointlessness of returning to the front again.

Filmed in stark black and white, the scenes of troop movements and large scale battles are as good as any today, and “uncommonly graphic for that era.” Apparently the censors of the day allowed the extra gore due to the “important” subject matter. Spielberg himself cites ALL QUIET as an influence on his own highly-copied, influential style in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

It must be qualified that ALL QUIET is an American production, with an all-American cast and crew. So it’s not like we should credit Germany for being so introspective; if anything, credit should go to Remarque for his singular tome. At that point in history, the tenor in Germany must have still been one of wary suspicion towards their victors – the Western Alliance (Britain, America, Russia, etc.). As with PATHS OF GLORY (1957, an American production that made the French look like war imbeciles), how hard could it be for a winning country to portray a defeated country as knobs? So though ALL QUIET is a remarkable film that does NOT glorify war, it is Americans not glorifying war from the point of view of the country they defeated. There is something petty and disturbing there that is never addressed in all discussions of this movie.

With this in mind, knowing that the human animal is a contradictory, self-serving, short-sighted swine, we continue…

The horrors of war: someone who won’t shut up when you’re playing Hide and Seek.

Remarque opened his narrative with: “This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…”

We are taken through every stage of how war affects men (except the political machinations that cause these conflicts in the first place). In a schoolroom, Professor Kantorek (Arnold Lucy, wide-eyed and crazy-haired), flies into jingoistic rhetoric inspiring the youth of Germany to enlist. The boys break out in fervent song, trample their books and march out the door – learning goes underfoot in favor of killing. The intensity and fervor is terrifying; Kantorek even chides Paul for having aspirations of being a writer: “Personal ambition must be thrown aside in the one great sacrifice for our country!”

John Wray is Himmelstoss, the local postman, who becomes a high ranking officer, harshly taking the boys through training. They disrespect him until his masochism strikes fear into them. At this boot camp stage though, it is still light-hearted, as the boys accost Himmelstoss and beat him in return. On the battlefield much later, Paul would see this torturer of young boys become a screaming coward.

Louis Wolheim is Kat, a veteran who shows the boys the art of survival amongst the trenches, how to recognize bombs, how to get food, how to handle loss. Paul’s own loss of innocence would come with the tragic fate of Kat.

In the trenches, as exploding bombs provide a constant drumbeat in the background, Paul’s unit sits out a long night trying to stay sane, enduring cave-ins, swarming rats, stir crazy boys and the thunder of war overhead. At some point in this interminable scene, we start to realize war is not about glamour and patriotism any more; it’s hardly even about fighting an enemy. It’s sweat and stench and neck-deep muck; it’s playing cards while the world falls in around you; it’s minutes that stretch into days and months and eternity.

Sudden action, as they must face the oncoming enemy in the trenches; awaiting bombs that screee through the blackened skies, crashing and breaking their fortifications, dust thrown up like choking curtains, advancing enemy soldiers overrunning their trench positions, then retreating again. (And keep in mind the advancing enemy – is “us,” the Western allies!) ALL QUIET is one of those movies that awakens the question: “How did it ever get to this state?” With men chasing each other back and forth over a muddied patch of ground, bayoneting each other, dying of horrifying wounds, kidneys stabbed, eyes shot out, hands broken, legs shattered by mines, faces torn by barbed wire… What the fuck is this all for? Because other men had disagreements. We can feel the insanity, the futility, the stupidity behind the decisions of the men with disagreements. It’s one of the first movies to capture and portray this.

In lieu of the political machinations, we are given a snapshot of how the trenches regard those machinations. Thousands of war movies would come after ALL QUIET, and so few protagonists would question why they are in the midst of their culturally-created and wholly unnatural mêlée:
“How DO they start a war?”
“One people offends another–”
“I don’t feel offended.”
“Somebody must’ve wanted it.”
“Maybe it was the English?”
“I don’t want to shoot any Englishmen. I never even saw one until I came up here. I suppose most of them never saw a German until they came up here.”
“Well, it must be doing somebody some good. Like the Kaiser.”
“Well, he never had a war before. Every full-grown emperor needs one war to make him famous. That’s history.”

Kat offers a solution, and as childish as it sounds, it could have saved humanity a lot of blood and bone over the millennia: “They should rope off a big field and take all the kings and their cabinets and their generals, put ’em in the center dressed in their underpants, and let ’em fight it out with clubs. The best country wins.”

Then the scene that would seal ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT as one of the firmest anti-war films of all time – the trench scene, where Paul, taking cover, stabs a French soldier, then spends two days and nights trapped with the dying man. A case study in human nature, as Paul goes through the stages of regret, remorse, trying to comfort the dying man, as shells rage above them. Paul tries to feed the spasming soldier some water, stagnant from the bottom of the trench; hours later, screaming at the silent, dying man in anger, “Don’t look at me like that – you’re going to die!” Hours pass, emotions rage across Paul’s face: anger, denial, guilt. Then the soldier dies, eyes open, in a half-sitting position. Paul: “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t do it!” He asks the dead soldier forgiveness. This scene is anything but heroic. It brings all the history lessons and high-minded political debates and nationalism and amorphous treaties down to the level of what “war” really is: people that don’t know each other killing each other for no apparent reason.

CITIZEN KANE is given its due amount of credit for so many pioneering filmic techniques, but movies like ALL QUIET remain at the forefront of our consciousness because they also revealed new cinematic techniques that live with us to this day. Was this one of the earliest uses of the tracking shot, as a camera follows the running soldiers across No Man’s Land, while bombs explode around them? All the actors veer onto the knife edge of theatrical overacting, but somehow redeem themselves by being in the moment as young and naïve.

Even as cries of “For the fatherland!” are replaced with disillusionment, the boys find small pockets of joy when they get a hot meal or a new pair of boots taken from a dead comrade. The inevitable meeting with farmhouse chicks – kept innocent for 1930s standards (but even broaching this subject was brave back in the day).

“Tell me seriously sergeant: When naked women roll around like this –
what have they got that I haven’t got?”

Paul is injured, sent home on leave, where he runs headfirst into the brick wall of ignorance. Ignorance of people who cannot possibly know what he has been through. If we thought the concept of the alienated soldier started only recently with PTSD (back then, called shell shock), here it is perfectly encapsulated. He visits his mother, who does not understand; he sits with old men and a map of Europe who do not understand, and finally, he visits his schoolhouse, where the same professor is spewing the same rhetoric to different impressionable young boys. Neither the professor nor the boys will ever understand…

Paul tries to humbly squirm out of making a statement, but the professor goads him into speech, and he rages almost uncontrollably: “…You still think it’s beautiful and sweet to die for your country, well, we used to think we knew. The first bombardment taught us better. It’s dirty and painful to die for your country! When it comes to dying for your country, it’s better not to die at all!…” The class is outraged at what seems like treason coming from Paul, but if the seed of truth is planted in just one of them – Paul has succeeded.

The final scenes are tragedy multiplied by tragedy, as Paul requests to be sent back to the front, the only “home” he knows. The final iconic shot shows his arm reaching for a butterfly – and a bullet claiming his life.

Like many war movies that rail against the horrors of war, ALL QUIET finds it hard to vocalize the reason why Paul felt at home when he was living on knife-edge in the trenches: because a soldier’s humanity is leached from him in training, in order to follow orders to murder effectively. With that leaching comes alienation from the human culture that they were once a part of. So they cannot rotate back into society. It’s a one-way street, grunt! But your very decision to join in the first place disallowed you to see that angle.

All may be quiet, but in the wrong way. Sanity is never heard from when it comes to war. All quiet on the sanity front, all the time.

END

Paths of Gory.

When it comes to dying for your country, it’s better not to die at all.
— Lewis Ayres, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

The quote from ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT may be misconstrued. If there really was such a thing as “dying for your country,” it would be stupid enough, but no one ever really dies for their country – they die to appease the small-penis insecurities and greed of the low, gutless swine who ordered them into war.

From the book by Humphrey Cobb, Stanley Kubrick directs PATHS OF GLORY – an outraged, frustrated scream against the duplicity, mendacity, idiocy, inhumaneness and ingloriousness of war.

For two years, a platoon of WWI French soldiers have been fighting futilely against Germans in trench warfare. Led by Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), they are ordered to storm a German fortification by their cowardly commanders, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) and General Mireau (George Macready, who looks and acts ominously like Dick Cheney). The attack is a failure, but the Generals – who think nothing of losing “51-percent casualties for the sake of moving their line ahead,” refuse to acknowledge the impossibility of success or their own lack of strategy and stupidity, and scapegoat three men from Dax’s platoon to be tried and executed for cowardice, as the reason for the failure.

Outraged at the injustice, Dax does all he can to stay the execution, meeting with Broulard and Mireau to plead not just clemency, but to avoid descent into the madness of arbitrary slaughter of their own men simply for the Generals to save face; further, Dax acts as legal counsel for the doomed men. All in vain. High command will have its blood – from the enemy’s side, or their own.

Cobb’s tale has not dated in half a century, its message, its impact, its depiction of low men in high places. Though PATHS depicts French officers heartlessly regarding their men as cannon fodder, the same attitude is adopted by every single faction that enters into war – the high commanders seeing their militia as statistics and the officers closer to the ranks becoming greater idealists, like Dax. (But who am I to talk? The closest I’ve come to trench warfare is taking cover behind rows of school desks and launching lethal shoes at my enemies before the teacher arrived and sent us all to the principal.)

Froggy Poffy

For its unafraid camera (Kubrick pans through rows of trench gutters, over shattered bodies, through glutting mud and ear-damaging explosions – all in stark black and white) and fearless unpatriotic concepts (Mireau orders his own men fired upon to get them out of the trenches, Dax goes hell-bent insubordinate against his superiors to save his men), PATHS inspires outrage, but could it have been all that hard for Americans and Brits to enact these foreign roles so convincingly and make the Froggies look like buttered croissants? Even though Kubrick portrays war as ludicrous on every level, from the fighting to the politics, we are left with the image of the French – not the Yanks or Limeys – portrayed as ludicrous. So ludicrous that France banned PATHS OF GLORY until 1975.

But the searing message is still damning for all nations. PATHS is so disturbing and cloying that the irony of its title is like a sledgehammer to the spine – unlike almost every other war movie existent, from then to now, we clearly see there IS no “glory” in war. And “war” these days covers every underhanded business decision (like George W. Bush’s ignominious Iraq defeat) and political and religious skirmish (from monks in Myanmar to Iranian elections). And the very same contradictory insanities from the high command in PATHS OF GLORY continue right now: The Geneva Convention clearly delineates torture as a war crime (Article 17, Article 130, and others from 1949) – yet George W. Bush tortures in the name of America and remains unconvicted, he jails soldiers who refuse to torture for their disobedience to his dictatorship, then jails scapegoats who DID torture to gain political capital; while Barack Obama allows CIA operatives who tortured to remain free, citing their excuse (“just following orders”) as valid, even though this same excuse incarcerated those at Nuremberg…

There is no Eleventh Hour stay of execution in PATHS OF GLORY. Kubrick and Cobb are intent on driving home the message that war means the bad guys will always win. Even if they’re supposedly the good guys.

END

Military Unintelligence.

Peter Weir’s stirring anti-war epic, GALLIPOLI, has a heart as large as Western Australia, a sweep as wide as its blue-chiseled skies and – Mel Gibson’s naked 24-year-old bottom.

GALLIPOLI is not about Gallipoli. The botched Australian and New Zealand Armed Corp (ANZAC) landing at that Turkish beach in 1915 is merely the backdrop to Weir’s wondrous character study of friendship and loss, as a trained athlete with a planned future and a natural athlete who is a drifter are thrown into an all-consuming social calamity which happened to be World War I.

Too right, cobber!

Rather than focus on the larger political canvas of the Battle for the Dardanelles (of which Gallipoli was a strategic plot point), Weir recounts the ANZAC effort from the naïve perspective of two barely legal Australian teenagers, Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Gibson, young and smooth as a baby’s – let alone his own – bottom), showing how the larger canvas obliterates the lives of the people providing the paint.The first half of the film, shot in the sweltering blue-skied expanses of Western Australia, is a paean to Life and Opportunity – languid, heady, joyous with innocence and aspirations. Though Australia was far removed from the European theater of war, propaganda was rife amongst the populace, inculcated to believe “you’ve just gotta be in it!” On a desert journey across a dried salt flat, blond Archy, always in white, espouses his blinkered views on patriotism, while dark-haired Frank, clad in black (like the rogue Solo to Archy’s angelic Luke), holds outlaw views that contravene the politics of the day: “It’s an English war, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

Archy’s uncle (Bill Kerr) has trained him to become a leopard of the track, a potential Olympian runner. To his uncle’s sorrow, Archy abandons his years of training to join the Army Light Horse. Yet there was so much military fervor sparking the air (gossip of friends joining and being honored, newspaper reports of “Germans crucifying kittens on church doors in Belgium”) that his uncle doesn’t question his “noble” decision to let his dream die and serve his country instead.

It is chilling hearing Archy mouth the same rationalizations that George W. Bush is rehashing in his epic War Of Terror (yes, I said “of” not “on”): “If we don’t stop them there, they could end up here.” (The movie is 1981 and the slogan is from a 1915 conflict, although the concept probably existed since cavemen had to cross the first lakes to stop other cavemen stealing their sexy, hairy-backed women.)

”Are you looking at my bottom again?”

Eventually devil-may-care Frank is worn down by the jingoism he encounters at every turn – he can only take being called a “coward” for so long (and chicks dig the uniform) – and joins the infantry with three mates (Aussie soap regulars, Robert Grubb, Tim McKenzie and David Argue) on the strength of reading about the glorious Gallipoli “baptism by fire.” (I still remember this phrase from school history lessons. Gallipoli is to Australians what The Alamo is to Americans – a bungled defeat re-imagined as a metaphysical victory.)Onto Egypt for military training in the shadow of the Giza pyramids (there’s no beating location shooting!), an incongruous festive atmosphere pervading the Aussie troops regarding the distant war as a lark. Why else would so many be convinced to sign their death warrants by recruitment? Combat exercises on the dunes are taken so frivolously that not only is every soldier uproariously laughing during simulated attacks on fellow troops, Egyptian boys run alongside the trainees entreating them to buy trinkets. The camaraderie was the drawcard: taking the piss out of the Brits, tales of heroism, singing, drinking, fighting, whoring, traveling the world with your mates. Who wouldn’t sign up for this vacation?

Tracks from Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene are incorporated into the smooth-pad soundtrack, with synthesized sounds strangely reminiscent of bullets firing and ricocheting, adding to the surreal sense of detachment that all these characters are under. Even when our lads arrive at Turkey, the first few days are spent partying on the beach (with Mark Lee’s eternally-dopey smile and Mel’s eternally-smooth bottom) with shells exploding in the distant hills.

But of course, director Weir (who co-wrote the script with David Williamson) is merely building the mateship, the humanity, the naiveté only to dash it against the selfishness, the inhumanity, the stupidity of battle, thus debunking the mythic aura surrounding Australia’s supposedly glorious entry into the Allied War Effort.

Nearly one and a half hours into the movie, one of Frank’s three mates returns from a trench assault, bringing with him a frightening reality, reporting their mate “Barney is dead.” And in these last few moments of the film, the anxiety is ramped to insane levels as Frank is made a runner between trenches, with Archy prepped to go “over the top” if Frank does not deliver the crucial “hold” message on time.

While sympathetic officers like Major Barton (Bill Hunter) try to coordinate and make sense of the melee, higher-ranking officers callously use their Australian troops as cannon fodder, to sycophantically lay the groundwork for the British troop followup – and each young Australian “digger” in his trench line silently re-assesses the motivation which led him to this intractable fate.

Miscommunication was a major part of the ANZAC downfall at Gallipoli and it could be argued that miscommunication was responsible for accruing that many troops willing to get their butts shot off in the first place – purposeful miscommunication by the military, throwing slogans and agitprop at the public to entice the disenfranchised and then sacrifice them to the maw of attrition. These lies are still being perpetrated by the criminals in power.

Weir offers us such intimacy with these characters (Frank and Archy drunkenly pasting beard on Archy’s face to fake his recruitment age, joyously reuniting on the sand dunes, racing to the pyramids, crashing an officer’s ball together, etc.) that when Archy scrambles out of his trench, in the last sprint of his life, his death comes so suddenly and unnecessarily that we feel the blow as harshly as the Turkish rounds ripping into his chest in the final still frame.

”You might get shot up there, but everyone has already seen my bottom.”

Though there are multiple nameless deaths, as soldiers leave their trenches and are pounded back into them as if punched, Weir focuses pointedly on Archy’s death to drive home the loss. In the last scene, Archy is running alone, all around him having been mowed down; he has dropped his gun and is simply sprinting forward over No Man’s Land, labored breathing and pumping feet, his uncle’s pep-talk echoing in his head: “How fast can ya run?” “As fast as a leopard.” “How fast are ya gonna run?” “As fast as a leopard!” “Then let’s see ya do it!!” At the beginning of the film, we saw Archy complete his race against the clock, as he flew across the wire in that runner’s pose to end all races – chest forward, head and arms thrown back. And now, the final still frame shows him in exactly that same position, another race ended…

In Frank’s agonized scream, we feel the loss, multiplied over 11,000 ANZACs, each one of them, a story like Archy’s and Frank’s; each one with family, good mates, dreams for a better life, and the potential to be anything but collateral damage.Many wonder out loud at what Muslims tell their troops to make them suicide bombers or how the Japanese ever made their Kamikazes crash into the decks of ships, but the Western world’s troops are no better in their seeming fanatic dedication to suicide when told simply that “their country needs them.” Archy is offered the post of runner but gives it up to Frank, desiring the role of martyr instead, seeing before him the futility of trench warfare and knowing full well his fate. Archy’s last letter to his mother illustrates that right up to the point of death the diggers held fast their fantasy: “There’s a feeling that we’re all involved in an adventure somehow larger than life.”

There was no other option addressed in trench tactics – if raising your head above ground and having it shot off could even be called tactics. Archy and the men around him fatalistically accepted this as their destiny. These men died in their thousands like lemmings, watching the line before them fall, then going over the top anyway, again and again, as if any one suicidal surge might benefit the greater good.

GALLIPOLI, like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT or PATHS OF GLORY, puts paid to the opprobrious oxymoron “War Hero.” By definition, anyone who engages in an act of war (political maneuvering that causes physical battle) is nothing short of a congenital idiot; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. No, I’m not a “peacenik” – sometimes conflict is unavoidable, to destroy something that threatens your well-being – but to recruit through lies, kill without need or utility, destroy for greed, to further someone else’s political agenda through mindless human slaughter; all these things are idiocy, hypocrisy and stupidity. The Heroes of War are awarded medals for having killed the most people (i.e. the most brutal butchers) or having survived and returned from battle (basically, someone who took cover really, really well). Those are criteria for HEROES? Guess Hitler was a war hero after all. Just like Colin Powell and Osama bin Laden. (Consistency, folks! Don’t award Powell Distinguished Service Medals – under the euphemism “exceptionally meritorious service” – without considering the “exceptionally meritorious service” Adolph or Osama provided their countrymen.)

War is Mel.

This movie is “heroic” for demonstrating how UNHEROIC war truly is.When the whistle blows and the troops surge over the sandbags in a futile crash into enemy fire, the few who hesitate are branded “cowards,” when in fact, they are the true heroes; not for the banal fact that they survived a war, but for the fact that they refused to die for a cause they knew nothing about and cared even less for.

GALLIPOLI is one of the great Australian films and one of the greatest anti-war films.

Both Lee and Gibson were poised on the brink of stardom after this film and Lee somehow failed to make the leap. Like Han Solo, it was the “dark one” who went on to major filmic success. By 1987, Mark Lee was doing television serials, while Mel Gibson had completed three MAD MAX films and had just been turned into a LETHAL WEAPON.

I think it was that smooth bottom…

END