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m_palmer45
Reviews
Oorlogswinter (2008)
Historically unrealistic
Aristides-2 and malcolmgw have already mentioned some of the holes in the plot that you can drive a truck through, such as Jack's leg being broken and rotting away one day but being magically healed when he clambers across a river along the underside of a bridge on the very next day.
Aside from absurd details like this, the historical premise of the movie is unrealistic. The events portrayed are supposed to have happened in January 1945, at a time when the Germans were running from the Russians in the East and mobilized their last reserves of manpower, weaponry, and fuel for the futile Battle of the Bulge in the West.
And yet this movie will have us believe that, just then, a whole company or so of German soldiers - all young men in their prime, well- fed, well-armed and -motorized, spic and span - are tasked with playing cat and mouse all day long with a bunch of hapless villagers in the Dutch countryside? And that, with 5 years of battlefield experience, none of them can hit a standing target at 50 paces?
I get that the makers of movies are more interested in human virtues and morals than in historical facts, but it nevertheless detracts from a move when the historical background is so poorly treated.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Great dialog, but unconvincing characters
The makers of this movie deserve credit for taking on a difficult subject - the culpability of dutiful servants of a terror regime - and for trying to illuminate it from both moral and legal angles. The choice of judges as defendants is perfect - as spelled out in a remarkable speech by the prosecutor, these men were well educated and mature when the Third Reich began to make a mockery of the rule of law. And yet, they consented to serve within this warped legal system that degraded them from independent servants of justice to accessories in crimes against humanity.
As others have noted, cast and acting are excellent. My main reservation is that, considering that this movie takes a full 3 hours, many of the characters remain too sketchy and unconvincing. The charges against three of the defendants are never spelled out, and their counsels never speak; they plead not guilty, sulk through the proceedings and are simply sentenced in the end. The only defendant that is more fully developed is a curious combination of courage, arrogance and submissiveness, brilliance and delusion, cynicism and remorse; he remains too enigmatic and out of the common for being able to 'explain' how more ordinary Germans really ticked and functioned in the Third Reich.
Some minor quibbles concern the historical context: Nuremberg, in 1948, certainly was in the middle of reconstruction, no longer just a pile of rubble; the Berlin crisis certainly did not threaten the 'loss of Germany and of Europe', and Dachau and Belsen were concentration camps alright but not the major sites of the annihilation of the Jews. Still, compared with the liberties taken by more recent Hollywood productions, this movie remains tolerably close to historical fact.