Passchendaele (2008)

Too many fans seem to be blown away

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

This is a load of pretentious overblown rubbish with a ridiculous and totally absurd plot. The characters are caricatures, the direction is leaden. As others have commented- the battle scene at the end is well done - unfortunately you have to put up with the rest - wasting 90 minutes of your life

Passchendaele is a decent World War One film, one of the best out there and there's not too many it has minor flaws but does the job brilliantly. Paul Gross has done a great job acting in and directing this film. Some may be put off by the love story but for me this just reinforces and shows the losses of many people during this time period and era. Passchendaele shows how many people who once lived to together as neighbors are divided by stupid things like family nationality and false loyalty and bad promises of adventure and glory. The love story isn't for everyone but wow many girlfriends and wives lost partners and how many young men never came home to true love or had a chance to live full lives? This film does get you thinking!Of course this is no Band Of Brothers in terms of scale (I know that's World War Two) but Paul Gross has done extremely well acting and directly. I find this film to be a good tribute to his Grandfather and to those who lost something because of World War One.The film is low budget however this doesn't really show to be honest and this is a fitting tribute and good story! With regards to the low budget the battle scenes could have been bigger and better but this is by no means a bad film.The acting and casting is spot on and this film really does show the stupid ill placed passion and faulted logic of young people in this era and, it shows the pressure many had to go through and be forced to fight for freedom not knowing what the loses and costs would be. World War One was a slaughter and waste of millions of lives and the deaths of certain characters and the gruesome way they die shows this war was not the fairy tale adventures many painted it to be at the start. Among all the blood and slaughter there is a story and the film does well to reflect and show not everyone fighting was a murderer or cold blooded killer and many just wanted it to end. We need more World War One films like this to teach young people the truths and to keep history alive so we don't make the same mistakes again.

Paul Gross wrote, directed and stars in this ambitious (yet still very CBC feeling) epic, following the exploits of the Canadian soldiers who fought in one of the key battles of World War 1 in 1917. The story follows Gross as a troubled veteran, his nurse girlfriend and a naïve boy who intersect first in Alberta and then through the bloody battle of Passchendaele.You can just tell that Paul Gross put his heart and soul into this and I really, really wanted to be impressed, finally getting the Canadian side of events after so many WW1 movies that just deal with the American or British. Unfortunately though its not great.Yeah it has its moments, it's visually impressive, the battle scenes are very well done, the trench warfare, the mud, the rain, the carnage and I got very caught up in the ending despite myself but this is also melodramatic at times, kinda choppy and (as I said) has a made for TV feel despite the big budget. Guys will be disappointed too because for the most part this is a love story.Still I am haunted by the ending, that final shot of the wooden cross in Calgary with the Bow river in the background infused with the white stone graves in France, beautiful. 11/16/14

Here's what you'll need to believe - for starters - in order to enjoy this movie: 1. A Canadian soldier gets a medal - promptly - simply for bayoneting a German in the head.2. Though badly wounded, he deserts, is caught, and somehow winds up back in Canada even though he's being threatened with execution as a deserter.3. On top of that, all three of his brothers have already been killed (as in "Saving Private Ryan"), and when he's reported missing his mother "dies of a broken heart." And that's just the first fifteen minutes! (I left out the part where a geeky blue-collar kid has sex with the gorgeous daughter of Calgary's leading physician on a table in the newspaper office where he works - in super-prudish, pre-Pill 1917. And the daughter wears a see-through blouse to a formal dinner party. The word "passion" is prominently mentioned a couple of times.) There's an evil, cowardly English officer, who is a worse villain than any German. There's the hero's nurse sweetie who, in one night, kicks morphine cold-turkey with his help. And there's the fact that all four main characters wind up together at Passchendaele.Whether or not you've seen "The Passion (get it?) of the Christ," you won't be ready for the explosion that magically blows the geeky guy out of a German trench into an upright, barbed-wire-and-wooden-plank crucifixion. Honest! Then the hero crosses 200 yards of swampy No Man's Land under fire from a hundred German guns - unhurt except for blood across his forehead. Then he hauls the cross, with his pal still writhing, back to Canadian lines. A bloody miracle! You get two Christs instead of one! A German officer nods his head in sadness and approval.The evil Englishman has already been blown up by a different magic shell that leaves the half-dozen Canadians around him unfazed and untouched. He's just uttered the cowardly words, "If the enemy breaks through, we'll be in DANGER!" The final scene of endless crosses is ripped off from the moving finale of "Oh What a Lovely War!" (1969).There's more foolishness that I won't even mention.The battle scenes are effective. But there *is* that crucifixion thing.And you won't learn much about Passchendaele, except that it was awful. A postscript tells us that the Germans retook the ground a few months later, so the effort was futile. That's as close as this movie gets to being informative.The postscript doesn't mention, though, that Allied soldiers won the war, and as a result Germany became a democracy for a number of years - until Hitler showed up.This is bad soap opera. No more, no less. And girls - you get to see a guy's ass close up while he's having sex!