A "Must-have"!!!
Added 11/3/2009
This is one of the best motion pictures ever made! Accurate and realistic. This extended version gives the linkage that the original version needed to be considered "Perfect"!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Reconstruction wonderful, movie so-so
Added 9/7/2009
From a technical point-of-view, the reconstruction of 'The Big Red One' was very, very well done. It's hard to see technical faults.
If you like combat, there is a lot of it in this film. However, the film still shows the unusual continuity of the original.
Overall, he film as a whole does not flow from one battle scene to another like a 'normal' film does. It start with scenes in North Africa, but it jumps from one battle to another, then you are suddenly on another ship going somewhere. There is nothing to hold the film as a whole together. I understand from the extras that this is what Sam Fuller, a WWII combat veteran and director of this film, experienced. But unlike this film, while he may not have known where he was going when he boarded a ship for an invasion, he knew that two months passed since the last battle and that he had been recuperating in XYZ for those 2 months. We weren't there and didn't experience it, so to me, the film jumps from one battle scene or even from one continent to another with little to tie the bits together.
And to be honest, some of the battle scenes seem kind-of corny.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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3 stars out of 4
Added 1/1/2009
Though The Big Red One should not be mistaken for a realistic movie (the platoon somehow is involved in every single campaign of the war), the film moves very quickly for an 150+ minute movie and is consistently engaging; it's not a great movie, but it will stay with you.
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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A true masterpiece!
Added 11/16/2008
No need to rehash plot points, but suffice it to say that The Big Red One - in all it's restored glory as Fuller intended - is a true masterpiece. One of the best WWII films ever made, with heartfelt performances and great action. Watching Mark Hammill empty a clip into the german soldier who took cover in the oven towards the end is one of the most chilling scenes in movie history - showing the reality of war and how brutal an affair it always is.
Disregard the idiotic complaints here...they are obviously written by kids with no appreciation for real film making. "Too long?" laughable. And for those who didn't find it believable, reality often is stranger than fiction - everything in the film is based on Fuller's own experiences.
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Fuller rocks
Added 9/18/2008
Having seen the original version of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, years ago, on television, I could see glimmers of something far grander, but did not know what it could be, and given the callowness of my youth, even had I known what was missing, I could not have mentally interpolated back what the studio that financed the film, Lorimar, had cut. Fuller was basically a B film auteur, having made his reputation on 1950s and 1960s B war films (The Steel Helmet, Merrill's Marauders), and the famous- or infamous, Shock Corridor, yet The Big Red One, which was a fictionalization of his real World War Two experiences with the First Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, was, even in its bowdlerized version, considered his masterpiece. And it's a good solid war film. However, The Reconstruction version, adding in over forty-seven minutes on this two disk DVD version, is a truly great war film, and ranks only below Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now as the greatest war film ever made. I would rank it with Regeneration, Patton, and Full Metal Jacket as the head of the next tier of war films. However, unlike Coppola's expanded Apocalypse Now Redux DVD version, with its questionable reinstatement of some bloated and unnecessary scenes, all of the restored scenes in the restored version of Fuller's film only enhance this film's narrative and characterization.
The tale is straightforward, and told from a GI's perspective, rather than from some omniscient eye in the sky. It is lean, filled with little moments, shorn of much visual poesy, yet, despite that, it is very poetic, albeit in totally different ways than the films of Malick and Coppola, which were self-conscious art films, in the best sense of the word. As in all of Fuller's war films, we know these men from just a few brushstrokes, but they are not stereotypes, like the ridiculously banal grunts in Steven Spielberg's ridiculous schlocksterpiece Saving Private Ryan. The main characters are five Americans and one German. The leader of the Americans is an unnamed sergeant (although he is sometimes called Possum) who starts the film, and ends World War One, killing a surrendering German soldier with his knife, four hours after the Armistice, and the violation of that code of war haunts him ever after. The scene, shot in black and white, and highlighted by a shell-shocked horse's attack on Marvin, under a large crucifix, is beautifully wrought, acted, and written, and sets the film's tone about the enduring irrationality and absurdity of war without having to delve into comedy like M*A*S*H or Catch-22 do.... All of this, plus the eye level view of a grunt, make this film something special. And, unlike Oliver Stone, Fuller does not need to wave his political banner in a viewer's face. Also, Lee Marvin is simply fantastic- this is his greatest role, and he should have won an Oscar for it, even though Hollywood would never honor a man like Fuller. Compared to Tom Hanks' sergeant in Spielberg's garbage, Marvin's is the kind of man men would follow into battle, and die for. The reconstructed film opens with the quote, `This is fictional life based on factual death,' and ends with an epitaph for Fuller. Never has a film's epigraph been more on target, nor more poignant. The Big Red One: The Reconstruction will be de rigueur viewing for war film buffs as long as films are watched. Who needs an Oscar with that sort of legacy?
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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A "Must-have"!!!
Added 11/3/2009
This is one of the best motion pictures ever made! Accurate and realistic. This extended version gives the linkage that the original version needed to be considered "Perfect"!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Reconstruction wonderful, movie so-so
Added 9/7/2009
From a technical point-of-view, the reconstruction of 'The Big Red One' was very, very well done. It's hard to see technical faults.
If you like combat, there is a lot of it in this film. However, the film still shows the unusual continuity of the original.
Overall, he film as a whole does not flow from one battle scene to another like a 'normal' film does. It start with scenes in North Africa, but it jumps from one battle to another, then you are suddenly on another ship going somewhere. There is nothing to hold the film as a whole together. I understand from the extras that this is what Sam Fuller, a WWII combat veteran and director of this film, experienced. But unlike this film, while he may not have known where he was going when he boarded a ship for an invasion, he knew that two months passed since the last battle and that he had been recuperating in XYZ for those 2 months. We weren't there and didn't experience it, so to me, the film jumps from one battle scene or even from one continent to another with little to tie the bits together.
And to be honest, some of the battle scenes seem kind-of corny.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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3 stars out of 4
Added 1/1/2009
Though The Big Red One should not be mistaken for a realistic movie (the platoon somehow is involved in every single campaign of the war), the film moves very quickly for an 150+ minute movie and is consistently engaging; it's not a great movie, but it will stay with you.
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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