Thanas wrote:
Band of Brothers is quite good, however it does have its wank moments. For example, I remember the scene where an american soldier, in broad daylight, without cover, manages to hit a 2-man area on a roof over 20 meters away with a rifle-mounted grenade. While being under MG42 fire.
Right.
You actually remember the scene wrongly: the guy was concealed, nobody was firing directly at him. Besides, even if it was like that, it's merely very improbable: things like these did happen sometimes. There were guys running about landing beaches with aircraft machine guns blowing up bunkers and manhandling wounded who never managed to get hit, people losing their wedding bands but not fingers to shrapnel, accidental bomb drops hitting correct targets, people falling out of airplanes and surviving, etc.
Enemy At The Gates, though, goes beyond that into outright propaganda territorry with idiocy like one rifle per two men and political officers thinking creation of heroes for propaganda purposes is a
new and radical idea.
As for U-571, Americans actually did capture a u-boat, the U-505, and the boat's cryptographic material was crucial for the Enigma decryption effort at the time (remember, it was a continuous operation to keep decrypting German messages, not just a one-time breakthrough), though of course the movie completely distorts the action (well, okay, invents one out of thin air) and naturally shows Americans as the only people capable of pulling it off.
Which is a shame, because it had really great effects and good acting, ruined by a shitty and generic plot (Yeah, a German destroyer in the Atlantic

). What's even better is the freakin' disclaimer put in at the end when people raised a stink over its treatment of history. It's like saying "Yeah, we know we pissed all over everybody not American who fought German U-Boats. Sorry. We're still releasing the film."
I wonder why it is that Americans couldn't be satisfied with the fact they designed and mass produced the best electromechanical decryption computers of the war, thus allowing for almost real-time decryption of Enigma messages? What, providing most of the equipment and manpower necessary to read the damned messages isn't good enough to prove American superiority?
The Spartan wrote:Anyhow, the point of my rambling that while it's not reprehensible per se that SPR focused on Americans given the plotline, it unintentionally helps to spread a belief that is reprehensible.
Unfortunately, a movie can't always show the whole extent of a very large and complicated operation in all its nuance, so
all war movies can be accused of this attitude. For example, if a movie about Stalingrad fighting doesn't show that women fought in that battle in all-women fighter regiments, does it help unitentionally spread the belief that the VVS was sexist? Not really - only if the audience is already ignorant.