Tragically beautiful WWII film that focuses on the psyche and emotional journey of a young British soldier during his training and wait before being send out at the forefront of the Normandy landings.

A great deal of its magic is precisely due to this more psychological twist to the tale. This melancholic, calmed, and quiet take of the events surrounded by a permanent sense of tragedy differs a lot with the most usual contemporary approach to the subject matter that focuses much more on the action and the “booms and bangs”.

But even on this department, the movie excels when digging into it. How? Well, with the simplicity of using real footage from the war (provided by the Imperial War Museum). Really, is there anything that could beat real-life images?

That combination of fiction and real footage is perfectly tied together by the various technical aspects of the film, perfect editing using cuts full of contrasts, tremendous photography to resemble the texture of the archival footage and presenting at the same time beautifully crafted shots and sequences full of symbolism, and a great use of sound (from dialogue inserts into the stock images to a fantastically enchanting score).

But as it was initially mentioned, more than looking for the proficiency in the technique (which we have just seen that it also accomplishes), this is mainly a personal and character driven story. The writing is so superb, and the performances are so spot-on that besides being completely engulfed in the feelings of the main protagonist you also come to feel extremely close to the rest of characters that you get to know in the various sub-plots.

In conclusion, after this enthusiastic review I guess that it won’t come as a surprise when I say that this is an undoubtedly MUST-WATCH! Stuart Copper, who came to be publicly known for appearing as Roscoe Lever in another “little” WWII movie by the name of The Dirty Dozen (1967, dir. Robert Aldrich), provides us with definitely one of the greatest, if not the greatest, War movie of all-time that should for sure be much more appreciated and studied by any filmmaker or film fanatic who wants to learn/see how to make a not just a tremendous picture on this genre but a tremendous picture in general.