Celluloid Heroes

I feel ancient around these kids. Like I’m on some Children’s Crusade.

Wolfgang Petersen’s obsessively detailed World War II epic remains one of the most influential war movies and certainly continues to set a gold standard for submarine movies. Even the best of the rest, such as Hunt for Red October, run a distant second. If this all sounds like fanboy blather, well, it is, but it’s still hard to overstate the achievements of this film.

Despite the era being a touchy subject for their countrymen, or perhaps because of it, the Germans have always seemed to make the best World War II films, including Stalingrad and the recent Downfall, presenting the most unflinching, apolitical examination of that conflagration. Das Boot certainly fits into that category.

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It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.

As a standalone movie, judged apart from its lesser sequels, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a pure, unfiltered dose of joyful escapism. Rarely has the medium of film been so successfully used for the purpose of pure entertainment. Free from director Steven Spielberg’s tendency for suburban navel-gazing, cute kids and distant parents, as well as producer George Lucas’s later bloated mythic pretensions, Raiders tosses overboard every piece of narrative flab as the story hums along like a well-tuned V-8 engine.

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It’s good to be the king.

Apparently, Mel Brooks had run out of movie genres that warranted spoofing in their own movie, so he threw together this occasionally successful hodge-podge of historical epics. This movie probably would have worked better if Brooks had found a few more historical periods to include.

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We don’t stop them there, they could end up here.And they’re welcome to it.

Gallipoli is not as much a war movie as it is a road picture with the Battle of Gallipoli as the destination. The story only gets down to the business of war within the last 30 minutes of the film.

This battle is to Australians in many ways what Pickett’s Charge was to American South in our Civil War, a moment of definition for the national character. The fact that it was a folly that ended tragically is part of the point. For those who see battle as the ultimate test of manhood, to advance in the face of the certain death is the ultimate display of your commitment to duty. The second and later waves of Australian soldiers to go over the edge of the trenchline during the Battle of the Nek were as certain of their fate as any man in Pickett’s divisions.

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Listen, nothing’s going to happen. This is just the opening credits.

This follow-up to 1979’s The Muppet Movie is a little heavier on the plot and a little lighter on the celebrity cameos but otherwise quite similar in tone. More important, it’s just as funny in the same lightly sophisticated but still kid friendly way.

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