8.2 ?
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krisdas1 — 13 years ago(January 08, 2013 11:01 AM)
Most stupidest WW2 movie i have ever seen. i give it a 2. Russia has lost more men than any other country and have won most imp battles in the ww2 and yet they depict themselves in a amateurish way in this movie.
Very poor performances by the lead characters.. -
caaalebbb — 14 years ago(January 07, 2012 08:28 AM)
The chaotic, disjointed, and nonsensical chain of events is far more representative to the realism of the way a young boy (and even people in general) experience war. A boy's plunge into the horrors of war makes no sense, is chaotic, cruel, confusing, and so on, and that should translate onto any great work of realism trying to portray that. To derive an organized and simple-to-understand, and to adapt a traditional format of a plot would be dishonest to the film's overwhelming sense of realism.
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caaalebbb — 13 years ago(May 01, 2012 01:42 PM)
I was not being sarcastic. I apologize if I came off that way!
My point was that the 'plot' is aimless only insofar as it is devoid of a defined telos. This is what I meant by 'disjointed' which in retrospect was a poor choice of word. This lack of telos is perceived by the critical commentators above (to whom I was originally writing) to be the absence of plot.
If a plot was merely a sequence of events, then it would always be untrue when someone would criticize a movie for it's so-called 'lack of any plot.' So then lets sophisticate what we mean by 'plot' and consider a plot as an interrelated sequence of events. Now, to a degree, one can justify any sequence of events as being related whereby one sees one event as being related to the preceding and succeeding events which again reduces the entire notion of a 'plot' to nothing. So then what gives a plot existence? It is not simply a sequence of events, nor is it simply an interrelated sequence of events, but it is the central singular theme or idea that interrelates the sequence of events. I think this is almost always a type of telos. So it is the telos which gives a plot existence.
Consider the movie "Memento", which, because of it's non-traditional sequencing, is the perfect example of the point I'm making. (If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it, and I would urge you to stop reading this because it might not make any sense if you haven't seen the movie and it might spoil the movie. If you have seen it and thought it's plot to be poor, then my example falls flat and I can only throw up my arms and say "Oh well, I can't win them all!") While every sequence in the movie is logically justifiable (as is everything in 'Come and See'), each new scene was disjointed from the last scene because the movie worked backwards, and thus, the viewer is whirling along with the anterograde amnesiac, in the chaos of a past-less existence, clinging on to the present moment, with no concept of what has happened in the preceding moments, for the present moment is all that exists for our protagonist. Yet, although each scene is disjointed from the moment before it, although the viewer has no conception of the past, but only of the future, it would never be said of the movie that 'it has no plot', because (even if the viewer isn't fully aware of the reasoning of their intuition) it is not the sequence of events which gives existence to a plot, but it is the telos which unites the sequence of events. In Memento, the film's telos is the beginning of the story (which is tricky for me to cleanly express because the 'telos' would not normally be associated with the beginning, but this little catch is actually what ultimately makes the plot so unconventional).
Now in the case of "Come and See," the telos is precisely the lack of telos. While each event is connected to the preceding, the sequence of events and that which connects the respective events is disjointed in relation to the telos, precisely because a telos does not exist. For truly, what 'telos', what ultimate aim can a little boy caught in such a horrid war see? To a little boy, our protagonist, there is no sense in these horrid occurrences; what must drive him is his survival, his immediate conscious, that which is here and now. So, similar to the child's point of view, each event or scene is connected only to the last with no uniting or overarching telos. Thus the absence of any type of underlying telos is the telos, and a result, it is precisely what gives the plot it's existence.
I meant no sarcasm before. -
yaroslavrudenko — 12 years ago(November 07, 2013 04:17 AM)
Need to read more about this film and other threads like:
http://www.imdb.com/board/10091251/board/nest/205674574?ref_=tt_bd_2
Good remark from user with nickname - earthman34:"The movie flows as sort of a surreal stream-of-consciousness sequence of events, without any background or attempt to explain what was going on (mainly because it was made for a Russian audience who would have been familiar with the history, at least at the time). Because of that, and because the history of WW II in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is pretty hazy to most American audiences, it can be hard for some people to follow what's happening."
It is normal that there are some themes which are not clear for people from US. To understand why and for what this film was created: checkout Klimov's interview in youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN9_r1NEnGM
As for me, there were not such films in Soviet Union before "Come and See". -
yaroslavrudenko — 12 years ago(November 07, 2013 01:40 PM)
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knoxfan2008 — 12 years ago(December 28, 2013 09:57 PM)
beep! the OP doesn't like the film, that's his feeling and he has explained reasonably why. Anyone saying "A russian film makes you think more than Hollywood crap" needs to shut up and think. There are plenty of beep Russian films and US films, to say no Hollywood film is complicated and makes you think, then you are blind and a gigantic hipster.
Who cares if he doesn't like this film, cry about it and move on. -
matthewwave-1 — 11 years ago(December 14, 2014 02:04 PM)
I agree with OldSam. That's why the 8.2 is ridiculous.
As for the OP's comments, all I can say is that all of the things he/she claims were confusing in the film didn't confuse me at all. Not the first time I saw it, not the second time I saw it. And I had read only very basic things about the plot like, no more than "a Russian boy sees the horrors of war firsthand," nothing much more detailed than that.
The most perplexing is the complaint that we just suddenly see the captured Germans. It took me a few seconds to realize that that was what I was seeing, but then it didn't confuse me at all that that was what I was seeing. I didn't think, "Wait, what are these Germans doing here?" It never occurred to me the concept of prisoners of war taken even after an attack that was otherwise successful for their own side was an odd thing. What would be freakishly odd to me is if that rarely or, worse, never happened in real life. I've always assumed that even the losing side often manages to take some prisoners. I don't get not getting that. I didn't need the movie to show me the act of them being captured.
I understood that the Hitler effigy was to serve the standard purposes of an effigy; the guys taking it on the road with them aroused both my amusement and my curiosity; and, when the guys talked about it as they placed it in the road (I can't remember the exact dialog), I understood it had been boobytrapped with explosives.
And why did Glascha drop out of the story? Because the main character went away from the place where she was, and she didn't. I just don't understand not getting that; I don't understand how the movie didn't make that perfectly clear.
To cut the OP some slack, the movie, its very storytelling approach, is a beautiful and disturbing blending of the dreamlike and the realistic, the graphically believable with, at times, the outright surreal. (The female co-pilot eating lobster in the cockpit is one WWII movie image I'll certainly never forget, and certainly a biting comment on the sad, misplaced superiority complex of Hitler and those who followed him.) But I never didn't know how one part of Flor's journey led to another; he suffered the dislocation of war, but I understood how he got to each place in the plot he got.
And, Holy Crap, is that storytelling approach beautiful. The cinematography just blows me away in this film, for one thing. Some of my favorite ever, I believe.
Matthew