I understand the importance of highlighting forgotten issues. And the effort made into doing so.

But honestly. This movie is really really bad.

So bad that it became funny.

A spectacled German sniper, just standing there, beside a tree. It made me spit out my coffee (okay okay, it was beer). German soldiers falling like flies with a few gunshots. Enemies meeting each other on a straight (!) path just staring at each other, then starting to shoot and charge. Blood that looks a lot like the ketchup I had earlier on my food.

Bates Wilder did a pretty good job though. Perlman and Zane... no idea what they were doing there.

Again, all respect for the historical references and the sacrifices that have been made at the time in the Great War.

But I'm looking at not just the message, but also at the movie.

And quite frankly, this movie sucks.

This is not one of the better WW1 films. My grandfather was in the Argonne Forrest at the end of WW1, and from what he told me, this terrain was nothing like what he described. It looks like it was filmed somewhere in the upper Midwest of the US. The dialogue is amateurish, and not indicative of how people spoke in 1918. The battle scenes seemed very staged and artificial. The acting was not too bad, and the music was very good, but that cannot rescue a heavy-handed script that politicizes the war rather than showing you by good directing how the plot moves forward. If you want to see a good film on WW1, see Westfront, or All Quiet on the Western Front or even 1917, which was very good; not this made for TV movie.

First off, this is the first Great War and not the second one. Captain William Rivers (Bates Wilder) is tasked to rescue a squad of black soldiers trapped enemy lines during the closing days of WWI. There is nothing about the rest of the war. Billy Zane and Ron Perlman had small roles.

It would have been a great story if it was true. I couldn't get into the characters, there was such little build up.