My favorite WWII movie

Tora! Tora! Tora! - excellent film
Enemy at the Gates had some memorable scenes.
Band of Brothers was a fantastic series.

on the world war 2 fiction side...

The Eagle has landed - a TV movie(?) in which Michael Caine leads a bunch of Nazi paratroopers (disguised as polish paratroopers) into a sleepy English village with the mission to assinate Winston Churchill.

Honestly it was better than it sounds :D
 
TopGun said:
U-571 was a load of Poop

It was all lies the Royal Navy was the first to capture an Enigma Machine (they went on to capture a lot more), the Yanks only captured one (towards the end of the war)
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It was just a movie.
 
As a followup, The Eagle has landed is also a very good movie as Conrad mentioend. High quality of acting in it.

Edfilho, you're going to have to explain a little bit...having watched "Patton" and "Platoon" I have no idea which you are talking about. Are you sure you are talking about Patton? I don't remember any part about a German officer stabbing a guy...?
 
Enemy at the Gates has some new things - like soviets shooting their own soldiers. The "russian front" was evil, really. Communists vs Nazis are rarely put on film, but that's were most of the ground battles took place.

I like Memphis Belle as well. It's hard to pick a favorite.

EDIT: The Soviet Union vs Nazi Germany. Most grunts barely had an idea of the ideologies involved, and a lot of them simply didn't care.
 
Nomad Terror said:
It was just a movie.
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Movies about major turning points in historical war should be somewhat accurate. Afterall, the Americans didn't do everything.
 
Hmmm... my favorite WW2 movies?

My Top 3:

Patton - Watching 'blood n' guts' was great, especially loved it when he slapped the soldier for crying - and got canned for it.

Tora! Tora! Tora! - Already stated earlier, it runs like a documentary and still fun to watch.

Band of Brothers - Kicks some serious ass.

A couple that suck:

Pearl Harbor - This sucked. A steaming pile of shit served to audiences on a silver platter, also produced by Disney

Redeeming Quality: Watching ships go BOOM!

Midway - Sucks. Story, splicing, historically garbled.

Redeeming Quality: Real war footage

U-571: Do I need say more?

Redeeming Quality: Great table coaster
 
LeHah said:
Movies about major turning points in historical war should be somewhat accurate. Afterall, the Americans didn't do everything.
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This is very true, and in regards to this entire line of discussion regarding U-571 and the British debate, did any of you Brits who hate the movie so much actually stay long enough to watch the end of the Movie? You know the part where they scroll credits up, and list all the Task Forces that captured coding devices and materials? And did you happen to notice that only two of them were American?

I prefer to look at U-571 the same way I look at D-Day. It's a wonderful presentation of the perspective of an event, but not very accurate in the actual details of the event.

U-571 never claims that Americans were primarily responsible for capturing coding material. They don't say it in the movie and they don't say it in any of the text that appears before and after the movie. They give full credit to the nations, ships, and task forces who were responisble.

The whole argument that it puts an American face on everything is pure bunk...we're talking about something that came out of Hollywood, which last time I checked was in America. It makes alot more sense for a production company to use American Actors when they're filming in America. At least to me.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
This is very true, and in regards to this entire line of discussion regarding U-571 and the British debate, did any of you Brits who hate the movie so much actually stay long enough to watch the end of the Movie? You know the part where they scroll credits up, and list all the Task Forces that captured coding devices and materials? And did you happen to notice that only two of them were American?
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That's the equivalent of a newspaper printing a great big "George Bush is dead!" on the front page, and adding a tiny "not really" at the bottom of the last page.

Anyway, I'm leaning towards Das Boot myself. The director's edition is great - in spite of its length, I watch it on average at least once a year. It's a remarkable film made more remarkable by the fact that it is (loosely - apparently, some German submariners had issues with Lothar Gunther Buchheim's book) based on true events, which puts the ordeal the crew and their boat goes through in a very different light.

Enemy at the Gates is also a great film, and very ground-breaking in its portrayal of the Russians... but it really needs to be watched back to back with Stalingrad. If you enjoy the story of the ordinary Russian sniper taking potshots at the evil Nazis, you really need to watch the story of ordinary German soldiers trying to survive in the face of the merciless Soviets, just to get a sense of perspective. Actually, that's a good combination to watch in any case - correct me if I'm wrong, but this may well be the only WWII battle that's been portrayed from both sides in fiction.

Oh, and I must say, in spite of everything, Pearl Harbor was kinda worth watching. If could fast-forward through all the talking scenes, the remaining half an hour includes some really neat plane sequences. Unfortunately, cinemas don't want to fast-forward stuff :(.
 
This is very true, and in regards to this entire line of discussion regarding U-571 and the British debate, did any of you Brits who hate the movie so much actually stay long enough to watch the end of the Movie? You know the part where they scroll credits up, and list all the Task Forces that captured coding devices and materials? And did you happen to notice that only two of them were American?
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I think only one of the five or so people who've complained about U-571 in this thread is British.

The whole argument that it puts an American face on everything is pure bunk...we're talking about something that came out of Hollywood, which last time I checked was in America. It makes alot more sense for a production company to use American Actors when they're filming in America. At least to me.
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Though I'm not sure I follow your logic in the first place, I believe the movie's first unit shoot was done in Italy.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
The whole argument that it puts an American face on everything is pure bunk...we're talking about something that came out of Hollywood, which last time I checked was in America. It makes alot more sense for a production company to use American Actors when they're filming in America. At least to me.
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I can name a couple of movies which are historically incorrect in the same way. The classic movie "The Great Escape" has the same problem with overemphasizing the American prisoners by changing the ethnicities of characters within the film.

Director Jon Mostow (not exactly someone I like - Terminator 3 ruined the whole point in the series) totally dropped the ball. Aside from the fact that U-Boat 571 wasn't captured (I think it was U 556 that had the codebooks to the enigma machine), the U Boat that had the Enigma device was brought into British hands several months before America entered the war.

Add to that the fact that the British were livid that Hollywood was apparently crediting America for the capturing the device and it's handbooks in a purely fictional fashion, that the movie was forced to be edited to contain the closing caption to make sure the audience knew what they saw wasn't remotely factual of any sort.
 
TopGun said:
That would be me :D

A Bridge Too Far is a good movie
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That's an understatement. A Bridge Too Far was an excellent movie, especially the scenes where the British airborne are fighting off the Germans in Arnhem. You knew they wouldn't make it out of there, yet the movie kept giving you glimpses of hope that maybe, just maybe, XXX Corps would relieve them in time.

And I have to agree about U-571 being crap. Aside from the fact that there were almost NO US subs stationed on the East Coast after Pearl Harbor, the whole premise of the film was crap. Morse code message through the hull actually being heard by the primitive hydrophones used in WWII? No, just no.
 
correct me if I'm wrong, but this may well be the only WWII battle that's been portrayed from both sides in fiction.
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I agree with you somewhat but I do think that The Battle of the Bulge does a very good job of showing what both sides (Germans and Western Allies) were enduring. Again, I highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes WW2 (or even if you don't, you might after this movie).
 
Well LOAF, my reference to Britians hating the movie was more a prod at the news reports regarding British response to the movie, which was all negative. I mean, come on guys...it's a Movie. And again I point out there no where in the movie does it state that Americans and Americans alone were responsible for capturing the coding devices during the war.

And, I already said, U-571 wasn't captured, but U-175 was...reverse the numbers and you get 571...which is catchier to say, though that may just be because we've been saying it so much.

Personally? I didn't like the Movie. It was fairly accurate in terms of what the men were doing with the boats and how they were doing (I said fairly, okay?) but the story wasn't real, not that that's a big secret. It just didn't capture my attention like Run Silent Run Deep.
 
Well LOAF, my reference to Britians hating the movie was more a prod at the news reports regarding British response to the movie, which was all negative. I mean, come on guys...it's a Movie. And again I point out there no where in the movie does it state that Americans and Americans alone were responsible for capturing the coding devices during the war.
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Then you probably shouldn't have addressed "you brits". :)

Seriously, if "it's a movie" were a reasonable response to criticism then no one would ever be able to criticize any movies ever.
 
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