The Lost Battalion
The Lost Battalion
| 02 December 2001 (USA)
The Lost Battalion Trailers

Fact-based war drama about an American battalion of over 500 men which gets trapped behind enemy lines in the Argonne Forest in October 1918 France during the closing weeks of World War I.

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Reviews
GUENOT PHILIPPE

Well, I am not a historian, especially about WW1. And I read many good comments on IMDb, just before watching this movie. I guess everything is quite accurate, very well documented by the makers of this film, with great care. I won't argue about the quality of this tale inspired from actual events. It is amazingly described: characters, sets, brutal, fierce, bloody fights, men to men, face to face, in a total blood and guts orgy of violence. I think there will be a before and an after SAVING PRIVATE RYAN in the war movie history. I mean about the fighting sequences.But something bothers me, in this feature, annoys me at a scale you can't even imagine. The screenplay emphasizes too much on the good Americans vs bad - ugly - Germans. Not Nazis, in WW1, YET...I think that in war, there is no good soldiers and evil ones; except maybe concerning WW2 with the SS elite Nazis troops, guilty of thousands of bloody slaughters. Back to this film, I insist on this because I know the film makers could have done something different. Only show the audience exactly what happened, without trying to make us think this instead of that. That's my own opinion. And, I repeat, it remains a good war movie.

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lilita-jpb

1) I am not weapon expert, but even i can see difference between U.S. army riffles in WWI and WWII. In movie we can see privates, armed with "M1 Garand" (invented in year 1932!), not authentic "1903 Springfield" (aka "Silent Death"), who privates use until WWII. Difference - M1 can load 1,5 times more ammunition and 3 times more fire rate! M1 was semi - automatic, Springfield requires reloading after every shot. Little difference?! 2) German army uniforms has borrowed from 1940 Year too. Especially - helmets. German helmets until end of WWI have significant pike on top, we cannot see even one in movie. And if we make little additional search in archives - how much truthful is this "True Story"? I am surprised, how much "truthful" can be film directors in a pursuit of cheap propagation.

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Tarek El-Ghdamsi

I will not comment on the facts or omissions or what actually happened versus what was portrayed. My comment is on the direction of the movie. The director appears to have learned his tricks of trade through reruns of "saving private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers". Where the camera work on those productions is superb and groundbreaking through the use of the first person perspective and excellent angles, in this production it feels contrite and jittery at best and gimmicky at worst. Wardrobe - obviously - took great pains to recreate the uniforms and equipment to great accuracy but the special effects department let down the whole visual experience with the acrobatic tumbles of the soldiers and the thriller style stunt work. The Ardenne shelling in "Band of Brothers" was nerve shattering and brought the terrible ordeal of the soldiers to the viewer in a way that is memorable. The attempt to recreate that effect here completely misses the mark.I'm afraid that the overall experience has not been pleasant and I kept wishing the director would stop trying to impress us and just tell the story.

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adam-1009

After watching this movie I was honestly disappointed - not because of the actors, story or directing - I was disappointed by this film advertisements.The trailers were suggesting that the battalion "have chosen the third way out" other than surrender or die (Polish infos were even misguiding that they had the choice between being killed by own artillery or German guns, they even translated the title wrong as "misplaced battalion"). This have tickled the right spot and I bought the movie.The disappointment started when I realized that the third way is to just sit down and count dead bodies followed by sitting down and counting dead bodies... Then I began to think "hey, this story can't be that simple... I bet this clever officer will find some cunning way to save what left of his troops". Well, he didn't, they were just sitting and waiting for something to happen. And so was I.The story was based on real events of World War I, so the writers couldn't make much use of their imagination, but even thought I found this movie really unchallenging and even a little bit boring. And as I wrote in the first place - it isn't fault of actors, writers or director - their marketing people have raised my expectations high above the level that this movie could cope with.

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