Movie Review: A Bridge Too Far (1977)

[oyaguy]

Comments

[mikey_iaco]

Nice review. I agree that the casting started to work against the movie. It became a distraction handling all these major roles when there was such little focus. By the time the movie was over, I couldn't recall one character from another. At least The Thin Red Line, even though it's much worse a movie I think, had some characters you could slightly remember.

[theskooch]

Sounds a lot like The Thin Red Line to me.

[oyaguy]

I would say A Bridge Too Far is in a different category of casting than The Thin Red Line. But where The Thin Red Line had trouble distinguishing their main characters (often a problem for war movies in general) to the point the people who are named on the movie poster are barely featured (Travolta, Clooney, even Cusack) and these nobodies are the real characters(Caviezel, Koteas), and the film doesn't tell us this for a long time. A Bridge Too Far just had too many people, that as soon as you start getting wrapped with the paratroopers in Arnhem, its back to the armoured advance and on and on. A Bridge Too Far was spending too much time trying to tell the story of Operation Market Garden. That's another reason why I really liked the Nijmegan Bridge scene, as the lead up to it required the attentions of a lot of the main characters, rather than having them all exist in their own bubbles doing their own thing.

[mikey_iaco]

I would say it has a similar problem to The Thin Red Line, but this movie has a coherent story. There's just too many people to know exactly who is doing what, but you know something is going on. The Thin Red Line felt like 3 hours of empty, senseless tragedy.