Bureaucracy Inaction (And The Damage That Causes)
First off, an announcement of sorts; after going through my list of reviews over the years (counting grab-bags while ignoring rewatches), I'm reasonably certain that this is my 1,000th review I've posted on Allison Tooey. I figured such a huge milestone deserved a special movie (at least by my standards), and thus decided on the movie Warriors, for reasons that will become clear very quickly.
Let’s be honest here; the only reason I watched Warriors (though it’s also known as Peacekeepers, apparently to confuse people) is because Ioan Gruffudd was in it. However, sometimes having an ulterior motive for watching a movie can lead you to something you enjoy that you never would have seen on your own otherwise, so I don’t feel particularly ashamed about this. As it turns out, while I won’t be putting this movie on any of my end of year lists, it was overall a pretty good movie.
The story takes place in the 1990’s, during the Bosnian wars. A group of British soldiers head over there as United Nation peacekeepers, which in practice means not taking sides in the fight and only helping those who are wounded. There are a few recurring faces, but the movie suffers from the problem of having characters with similar uniforms and haircuts blur together, so I’m afraid I can’t entirely tell you who’s who. But notable figures are the man whose family is into soccer; Gary Sprauge (Joe Renton), who was called to the front just before getting married and who learns while he’s over there that his girlfriend is pregnant; and John Feeley (Gruffudd), who has a leadership position and therefore has to follow orders while making sure his men do the same. The problem is, it’s very hard to remain neutral when innocents are dying all around you and you’re told you can’t do anything to stop it.
If I had to compare this movie to anything, it would be Das Boot. The movie predominately consists of a series of vignettes, which alternate between slow stretches without much happening and then bursts of action. Though in this case, “action” can either mean gunfire and explosions or the characters stumble across a brutal murder scene. As the movie goes on, even the non-action vignettes start to get some tension to them, because every civilian the soldiers interact with has a very high chance of turning up dead later, so you just kind of wait for the other shoe to drop. I wouldn’t exactly call the movie gory or even intense, but it’s definitely not a feel-good movie. The whole thing is very effective and gives you a sense of what it was like during that time without relying too much on exposition, but you really have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it.
I do have one big issue with the movie, though, and that’s the pacing. The beginning of the movie is particularly weak, even though I know what they were trying to go for. We spend six minutes seeing a bunch of random things-people watching a soccer match, a man discovering his brother died on the family farm, a birthday party-before we finally get a glimpse of uniforms (and Ioan, as it turns out) and Sprauge gets a call telling him that his leave’s been cancelled and he has to return to duty. But even then, we still get random scenes of civilian life until the eighteen minute mark. Obviously, what we’re supposed to be taking from this is seeing the normal lives of the characters before they’re deployed, but we barely have any idea what’s going on, and since three of the four people we’re following have similar haircuts and face shapes, we can’t really tell who’s who, either. In fact, we don’t actually hear their names all that often, so that makes things even harder to follow. It’s not a bad idea in theory and helps contrast with the last few scenes of the movie when the surviving soldiers return home, but I don’t think it needed to go on for that long. After that, things do settle down somewhat, though it’s hard to tell how much time has passed between the incidents we see. But then we have another weird moment where we watch one character hit a breaking point and start chewing out one of the enemy combatants…and then suddenly we cut to another character in civilian clothes, discussing the incident with a woman. Clearly it’s some sort of hearing or deposition about what happened over there, but it comes out of nowhere and clashes with the “watch as things unfold” style of storytelling we’ve had prior to that point. We get another glimpse of the hearing after everyone’s returned home; why couldn’t this have waited until then? It doesn’t exactly ruin the movie, but it does break the immersion. Slightly tighter editing probably could have made this a stronger viewing experience.
Would I recommend this movie? Like I said, you need to be in the right mood for it and there are a few hurdles to clear, but overall it’s not a bad movie. The acting is good (though I am biased as far as one of them is concerned), the situations feel realistic, and you’ll probably alternate between being horrified and being sympathetic, which I’m pretty sure was the movie’s intent. If you want a more introspective war movie, then you may want to give this one a look. Just be prepared to have some cheering up material on hand afterwards.
Let’s be honest here; the only reason I watched Warriors (though it’s also known as Peacekeepers, apparently to confuse people) is because Ioan Gruffudd was in it. However, sometimes having an ulterior motive for watching a movie can lead you to something you enjoy that you never would have seen on your own otherwise, so I don’t feel particularly ashamed about this. As it turns out, while I won’t be putting this movie on any of my end of year lists, it was overall a pretty good movie.
The story takes place in the 1990’s, during the Bosnian wars. A group of British soldiers head over there as United Nation peacekeepers, which in practice means not taking sides in the fight and only helping those who are wounded. There are a few recurring faces, but the movie suffers from the problem of having characters with similar uniforms and haircuts blur together, so I’m afraid I can’t entirely tell you who’s who. But notable figures are the man whose family is into soccer; Gary Sprauge (Joe Renton), who was called to the front just before getting married and who learns while he’s over there that his girlfriend is pregnant; and John Feeley (Gruffudd), who has a leadership position and therefore has to follow orders while making sure his men do the same. The problem is, it’s very hard to remain neutral when innocents are dying all around you and you’re told you can’t do anything to stop it.
If I had to compare this movie to anything, it would be Das Boot. The movie predominately consists of a series of vignettes, which alternate between slow stretches without much happening and then bursts of action. Though in this case, “action” can either mean gunfire and explosions or the characters stumble across a brutal murder scene. As the movie goes on, even the non-action vignettes start to get some tension to them, because every civilian the soldiers interact with has a very high chance of turning up dead later, so you just kind of wait for the other shoe to drop. I wouldn’t exactly call the movie gory or even intense, but it’s definitely not a feel-good movie. The whole thing is very effective and gives you a sense of what it was like during that time without relying too much on exposition, but you really have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it.
I do have one big issue with the movie, though, and that’s the pacing. The beginning of the movie is particularly weak, even though I know what they were trying to go for. We spend six minutes seeing a bunch of random things-people watching a soccer match, a man discovering his brother died on the family farm, a birthday party-before we finally get a glimpse of uniforms (and Ioan, as it turns out) and Sprauge gets a call telling him that his leave’s been cancelled and he has to return to duty. But even then, we still get random scenes of civilian life until the eighteen minute mark. Obviously, what we’re supposed to be taking from this is seeing the normal lives of the characters before they’re deployed, but we barely have any idea what’s going on, and since three of the four people we’re following have similar haircuts and face shapes, we can’t really tell who’s who, either. In fact, we don’t actually hear their names all that often, so that makes things even harder to follow. It’s not a bad idea in theory and helps contrast with the last few scenes of the movie when the surviving soldiers return home, but I don’t think it needed to go on for that long. After that, things do settle down somewhat, though it’s hard to tell how much time has passed between the incidents we see. But then we have another weird moment where we watch one character hit a breaking point and start chewing out one of the enemy combatants…and then suddenly we cut to another character in civilian clothes, discussing the incident with a woman. Clearly it’s some sort of hearing or deposition about what happened over there, but it comes out of nowhere and clashes with the “watch as things unfold” style of storytelling we’ve had prior to that point. We get another glimpse of the hearing after everyone’s returned home; why couldn’t this have waited until then? It doesn’t exactly ruin the movie, but it does break the immersion. Slightly tighter editing probably could have made this a stronger viewing experience.
Would I recommend this movie? Like I said, you need to be in the right mood for it and there are a few hurdles to clear, but overall it’s not a bad movie. The acting is good (though I am biased as far as one of them is concerned), the situations feel realistic, and you’ll probably alternate between being horrified and being sympathetic, which I’m pretty sure was the movie’s intent. If you want a more introspective war movie, then you may want to give this one a look. Just be prepared to have some cheering up material on hand afterwards.