Starting with the casting this movie has everything going wrong for it but the story. In the right hands with the right budget and the right actors it could be compelling. The casting is terrible because to show three generations at work you need to have actors and actresses who are distinctly of separate generations. The grand sons in this should be played by people no older than 28. Instead we get a 50 year old actor playing the grandson of someone only 5 years older and behaving in a manner more akin to that of a person in their 20s.
The next problem is editing and dialogue. Snails pace editing and flat undramatic dialogue means that this movie feels a lot longer than it's already bloated run time. Again the actors and actresses don't bring much to a flat script. After that there's the special effects. For war scenes the movie depends on newsreel footage. And the big apocalyptic 4 horsemen scene feels shoddy and is way way over dramatized.
The third thing is that this version moves things from the source novel's First World War setting and plants in World War 2. This weakens the story by removing neutrality as a viable position. Because the historiography of the second world war determines that nazi germany is the height of all evil the position of all family members becomes compromised and the moral center of the movie and it's central theme of families broken by war have been displaced by general revulsion to nazism.
This is the type of movie hollywood should remake. Movies where things didn't quite go right. But economics of hollywood suggest they'll keep remaking the same successful thing over and over until it stops being successful..
The next problem is editing and dialogue. Snails pace editing and flat undramatic dialogue means that this movie feels a lot longer than it's already bloated run time. Again the actors and actresses don't bring much to a flat script. After that there's the special effects. For war scenes the movie depends on newsreel footage. And the big apocalyptic 4 horsemen scene feels shoddy and is way way over dramatized.
The third thing is that this version moves things from the source novel's First World War setting and plants in World War 2. This weakens the story by removing neutrality as a viable position. Because the historiography of the second world war determines that nazi germany is the height of all evil the position of all family members becomes compromised and the moral center of the movie and it's central theme of families broken by war have been displaced by general revulsion to nazism.
This is the type of movie hollywood should remake. Movies where things didn't quite go right. But economics of hollywood suggest they'll keep remaking the same successful thing over and over until it stops being successful..