An enigmatic war tale that was trivilaised without proper direction.
Stanley Kubrick the master, shows war on the face yet again. The earlier film where he showed us war as it is, is "Paths of Glory". He returns to how brutal the training camp shall be to how gruesome and ruthless and merciless war shall be. He sure has a humane touch yet it seems disjointed in this one.
Based on the trauma of American Soldiers in the Vietnam War, this movie travels from the training camp to the actual battlefield and takes pitstops in between to devise strategies of the war. Walking through the corridors of the camp to the trenches of the war-field the ambience created is perfect and it made me as if I were there. This is a commonality in most Kubrick movies as he takes the audience right to the place where the scene is happening and that's the reason he is so great. He transposes, translocates and takes the audience into a trance of the movie, where we believe that it is happening for real. He then asks us the question, how do we feel? Ah, I love Kubrick just for this.
Having said that, this movie fails in terms of keeping the viewer focussed due to the disorientation it goes through. I love Kubrick more than most and yet I found this to be a movie less interesting, though it made me sit for the whole length and just made a vague impression rather than a strong one.
It is superb technically, but Kubrick made much better war movies than this. I am disappointed does not mean this is bad, this film is no way bad and I rate this 3/5, good one, just not the perfect Kubrick one.
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