A good movie

Since this movie seemed to have a solid reputation (it is included in the ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ list, among other things), I thought I might as well check it out. Well, to be honest, I thought it was rather hard to judge this movie after all. Indeed, on one hand, it was a huge box-office success at the time, it was also the first time that a war epic of this size was made (we shouldn’t forget it was made already 100 years ago) and it was really influential for all the war movies that came afterwards. However, on the other hand, I have to admit that I actually struggled to really care about this movie though. Indeed, first of all, there was the fact that, with a running time of 150 mins, it was pretty damned long. Then, another thing that bothered me even more was the fact that it took them forever to finally get involved in this worldwide conflict. Eventually, I’m not sure if I really cared about these 3 soldiers bonding about the most random things that you could imagine. The war scenes came therefore fairly late but these were the reason why this movie became pretty famous. However, to be honest, even these scenes left me rather unfazed. That’s the tricky thing when you watch a movie so old, it’s sometimes difficult to forget all the movies you have seen in the same genre that came afterwards which were technically obviously superior to this one. However, none of these other war movies would have been possible if this movie wasn’t made in the first place. Anyway, to conclude, even if he didn’t really blow me away, I have to admit that it was still a decent watch though and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

7/10