I am planning to see it sometime because I adore The Gross :3 His "Men With Brooms" ranks pretty high there for me.

Those darn poppies,

Inannawhimsey

I am not a fan of war movies.  Generally I do not go and see them, rent them or watch them when they come on tv.  However, I am a big Paul Gross fan.  Therefore my answer to if I would go see it:  I don't know.  Maybe.

Greetings!

If I had a movie theatre nearby . . . I would definitely go.  I will have to wait until it comes out on video.

Hope, peace, joy, love . . .

My grandfather was killed at Passchendaele. Last year I saw his grave at Tyne Cot for the first time. I saw the graves of the four stretcher bearers who were carrying him back to the trench when a schrapnel shell killed all five of them. That was on 4 October 1917. I have seen the place he died and walked from the start line for the New Zealand attack on 4 October 1917 to the objective he never reached: and it took me half a day. His death orphaned my mother when she was seven years' old; it killed her mother with heartbreak.

My father won the Military Cross in the Second World war, serving with a front line infantry battalion. He was wounded. I have read his diaries and autobiography. He died two years ago. He was a confirmed pacifist who opposed the Korean war, the Vietnam War and any other squabbles New Zealand got embroiled with. He was disgusted with the whole idea of war movies, and loathed John Wayne. He loathed cowboy movies and violent depicitions of all sorts. He told me repeatedly that me that a "just war" was a political fabrication, always… even the one in which he had distinguished himself He just didn't know what else anyone could do in that time at that place to end Nazism. He encouraged me in my protests against Apartheid in South Africa and in support of Maori issues in New Zealand.

I will NOT be going to the movie.

What is it interesting to me, is that individuals are presuming, and this maybe based on reviews, that it glorifies war.

In fact, it is told from the perspective of someone who does not glorify war, far from it.

It tells the story of a mother who died similairly to what you presented Mike.

It speaks to the ungodly death rates, and the logic behind war.

Hi Pinga,

I shared on one of Woolmander's threads in Politics that I went and saw Passchendaele with my wife and son.

My wife went because she had a great uncle who was gassed in Passchendaele and he played a very special part in her life when she was much younger.

My son went because he is a movie hound and tries to see almost everything that comes out.

I went because it is a piece of Canadian history and I hoped that the story could be told even handedly.

Nothing in the movie itself was designed to glorify war.  At times it takes an anti-war tack.  Very similar to the approach that MikePaterson shares about his father.

Every bit of propaganda offal that the British recruiter tromps out is gently but soundly thrashed by Gross' character.  Particularly the "rumour" of the Germans crucifying an allied soldier.  That was dealt with so quickly and so openly in the beginning that I failed to pick up that it was telegraphing events later in the film (which bore up Gross' character's belief that the crucifixion rumour was a steaming pile).

On the whole I found the movie to be quite thoughtful.  It doesn't paint the collective "we" as virtuous and the collective "they" as demonic.  In fact, I think that the film went out of its way to portray the collective "we" as being as capable of barbarism as the collective "they" and the collective "they" being able to take a break from their barbarism to demonstrate an act of compassion that puts the collective "we" to shame.

It certainly doesn't protray anyone as being flawless.  It is a great study in the doctrine of Total Depravity because it shows how even a hero is far from perfect.

I don't know if the title is very appropriate.  Passchendaele seemed to be more means than end.  The movie is not actually about the battle itself so much as it is the prejudice that precipitates tribal hatreds.  The "making of" documentary entitled "The Road To Passchendaele" seems, to me, to be a better fit even though it is longish.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Thank-you revjohn for taking the time to write much better what I tried to express.

and yes, that would have been a wee bit too long of a name..

In addition, it made me rediscover the word: xenophobia

I guess my repugnance for war films was instilled by my dad: he went to one once and came away seething. He told me (when he was in his 70s and I'd I made the mistake of mentioning a film I'd seen) that the movie he had seen — sometime in the 1960s — had not deliberately glorified war but it had that effect because it didn't make war vividly horrific enough: if you haven't tasted terror, smelled the filth and the death, scraped the stinking, maggoty flesh of a close friend up with your bare hands for burial, watched the agony of life crossing and draining from a young enemy's face as he dies standing on the end of your bayonet and feel his every twitch and convulsion through the rifle you're grasping in your hands, been woken up by an artillery barrage five minutes after falling asleep after being on your feet in action for 40 hours on end, being so ripped up with dysentery that your battle-dress trousers are stiff with your own ordure and there's no place to wash, had friends blown to bits by your side and been sprayed with their blood and brains and felt that sudden spray of warmth grow cold on your cheek, or known the desolate loneliness of standing between paths of tracer bullets in the middle of a moonless night attack and suddenly realising you didn't know where you were or which way to go, unexpectedly coming across heaped civilian corpses, hung, bayonetted or shot in cold blood by the Nazis, and being unable to resist a surge of spirit-shrivelling hatred and knowing that it was pure evil rushing through your being … you know nothing of war, he said (and I have greatly abbreviated the lecture he gave me). It's not, John, that "they" did this or "we" did that: it's what my dad called "demonic insanity" where nobody does what they were born to do. He'd had all of these experiences and more: four years in close action with a NZ infantry battalion through the Italian campaign, wounded, commissioned in the field, Military Cross (one of about 250 awarded to New Zealanders in the Second World War). He had nightmares for decades afterwards: in his 80s, I heard him yelling in his sleep. And he was an ardent pacifist. No war, he believed, was justifiable — ever — even the one he'd fought in. He felt he had sinned very deeply but was forgiven in God's eyes because he had known no other option that what he had done.

He said if they ever made a war picture that gave people an understanding of war, there'd never be another war. Anything less was the same as glorifying it, in his view.

Hi MikePaterson

I think that is a very legitimate argument to make.  Depictions of war should make us recoil and want to get far away not shovel in more popcorn and get upset when the scene shifts to something else.

The war films of this generation I think, try their hardest to capture that.

And if they fail it is simply because human imagination pales with human experience.

The beach landing of Saving Private Ryan was, for me, tough to watch.  I doubt that it was anywhere near as bloody as the real thing.  It was no fun to watch.  It was hideous and something that I couldn't turn away from.

The muddy fields of Passchendaele (the movie) were probably not muddy enough for the reality.  They were though, plenty muddy.  The immediacy of gore, again, while not comparable to the real deal was enough to cause this viewer to flinch.  And it took one or two very near shell bursts for me to adjust to the fact that I wasn't going to get smeared just by watching.

Well put.  I think Gross's character lifts that up though.  When he has the luxury of being able to think he is very thoughtful and very critical of the whole enterprise of war.  When the character is in the trenches and only has time to react his thinking gets very, very circular and the only goal is to survive and bring as many of his troops through with him.

Indeed it isn't Gross's characters wounds which plague him so much as his action immediately before the shell.  He doesn't shrink back from fear of injury so much as he shrinks back from what he is becoming.  Demonic is very appropriate.  In a moment where he has the luxury to think his thoughts suddenly go very ugly and while he sits in that moment the shell goes off and he wakes up home in Canada.

The powers that be think that his close call has cost him his nerve.  They cannot understand that his nerve is failing because he fell.

Maybe that is true.  I think that is an overly optimistic goal.

There is very little that is "imaginary' that has the power to scar us the way reality can.  Denial works against us more often than it works for us and the real grit of war is, for the most part, something utterly outside our experience.

The closest many will get is to talk with a Veteran.  We will get an appreciation of the horror as they recount theirs but we will always fall short in the understanding department.  Something or the reality is lost in the translation because there are some times when words completely fail.

The closing credits recount the rest of the story sharing the fact that the Germans retook Passchendaele the next year in an offensive that was only a week long.  It begs the question, "of what value then?"

I cannot come up with an answer.  Every one I try dies uncompleted.  None even have the seed of promise of something that will satisfy.

And that, I think, is as it should be.

An answer would let me justify all the death needed to reach that objective and hold onto it.

There is no justification.  I think the movie makes that blindingly obvious.

Grace and peace to you.

John

When the Germans re-took Paschendaele, the little village that once was there on the barely discernible rise they called "high ground" had been completely erased.

It was let go of by the Allies because the Germans no longer constituted a threat: the attrition in the trenches had sufficiently weakened German militarism for the end to be in sight. The Allies had simply "lasted" longer: and at the end, the mutual butchery of young men from around the world has proved utterly inexplicable.

It should have revealed the moral vacuity of militarism; it should have made blindingly clear the demonic comedy and insane horror of war; it should have seen countries whose leaders are disposed to war depose those leaders; it should have destroyed human faith in ideologies and utopianism and jingoism, in nationalism and myths of glory: that it failed to do any of these things only makes it even more evil.

And humanity more clearly flawed at the quick.

John:

Isn't movie-making primarily about entertainment?

Aren't there things that only are diminished by the touch of that industry?

Hi MikePaterson,

I think that entertainment is probably still primary.  I don't think that entertainment = fluff.  At least not 100% of the time.

I think that some have embraced movies as an art-form and genuinely aspire to tell stories and communicate something worth talking about.  Steven Spielberg is one, I think, who has become more story teller than entertainer.  Though, he can also entertain if he chooses to.

There will be artistic license taken from time to time which may not always be a bad thing.

Genre probably helps on the story telling front. 

Grace and peace to you.

John

I have asked a couple of people from social to pop into this thread, as there is a dialogue there as well.