The Big Red One

Penetrating, outstanding war drama that depicts, with care and well constructed plot divided in many simultaneous dramas, the lives, hopes, sorrows and, before all, the profound loneliness of a group of young and inexperient soldiers in the WW2 and the friendship and deep respect between them and their old and calused sergeant, a superb performance by Martin.

Maybe the movie is too overlong which reduces its impact but it's extremely rewarding to see this one.

I give this a 7 (seven).

This film is really about the experiences that Sam Fuller had during WWII. It is a bit dated, and the low budget really shows, but SF clearly did the best with what he had, and it stands as a great monument on war from a director who was really there.

All of the characters are very likeable, and well acted by Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, and company. The movie is fiction but influenced by real events. Many of the scenes, especially one involving a group of older sicilian women who cook a big meal for the squad, ring very true, since a fiction writer would obviously try and spice them up--the film is very honest, and it is good that Fuller left this story for us. I also like how it ends on a positive, optimistic note.

"The real glory of war is surviving."

Some movies are like buried treasure; someone manages to slip them into the theater, practically under every critic's nose, where they either thrive or famish and then vanish into the nearest video catalog. "The Big Red One" is one of those films. For all the hoopla created by "Saving Private Ryan" (another excellent film, which, in my opinion, had a better understanding of it's subject than a lot of it's critics gave it credit for), it owed a great deal to what Sam Fuller did a decade and a half before.

Lee Marvin, an actual WWII veteran himself, holds the film together as the tough but exhausted seargent. When he tells Mark Hamill (yes, Luke Skywalker, folks) that you don't murder animals, you kill them, the look on his face after that seems to say that he wished it could be some other way. It's hard to grab defining moments in this film as stand-out, but the two sequences that stick the most to my mind are the taking of the insane asylum and the horrors of the concentration camp. While other movies have focused on specific campaigns, "The Big Red One" deserves high marks for painting the broad canvass of the Second World War from the perspective of the guys who actually had to do the work.

"The Big Red One" is an episodic war movie from maverick American filmmaker Samuel Fuller. Having only seen "Shock Corridor" from the director's oeuvre, I didn't know what to expect from him this time around. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that Fuller was never going to be a mainstream filmmaker. There's something about his style that's really off-putting. You empathise with the camera, not the actors. It's like they're at odds with each other.

This is not a bad thing, as you can tell from the enthusiastic reception Fuller's movies have gotten here on IMDB. But "The Big Red One" is also drastically cut down from the original print Fuller had, and I wonder if that's why it feels so disjointed.

Of course, it is supposed to be episodic, but I don't know. I didn't really get into it.

Perhaps I am an exception but this film really did nothing for me.

The premise is simple: the experiences of a US infantry squad led by Lee Marvin fighting in Europe and North Africa during WW II. It was supposed to be about the experiences of the men who fought but I didn't feel the film delivered that: none of the characters were really explored or given much depth, even the great Lee Marvin seemed distant and cold. There isn't too much dialogue, in fact there isn't too much of anything in this film. Its just there but it doesn't really give you much, it just leaves you cold. The plot is occasionally just plain weird and confusing, not the good kind of quirky type of weird but just strange for no apparent reason and with no charm to it.

The action scenes are average, nothing special but enough for their purpose. What annoyed me was that so many different locations were so obviously filmed in the same sandy country (Israel) and it just didn't come off as very convincing. I didn't believe that what I was being shown was really the place it was supposed to be. Its also a quiet film, with very minimal music which in itself isn't bad but just gave the whole thing a somewhat sleepy atmosphere. I wouldn't go so far as to say the film was boring, it wasn't but it just wasn't that attention grabbing either.

Its a film that is there but it did absolutely nothing for me. Others however might enjoy it.