El Alamein (2002)

That was an excellent one.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

I generally enjoy war movies, particularly WW2, and I'm not obsessively fanatical about true-to-life details. But this movie is just not very good.It starts out with great potential. The new lieutenant's introduction to the dangers of the British 88's, where he burns one of his "three miracles" definitely grabs one's attention. The sniper incident is also interesting. The soldier's personalities are sympathetic and you do come to care for them.But there is a bit too much lack of realism. The scene with Mussolini's horse is absolutely ridiculous. While it's evidently true that El Duce had his horse (which was white, not black as shown here) sent to Africa in order to ride it in a triumphal march into Egypt, I very much doubt it was loaded into an ordinary army truck strewn with hay and driven around aimlessly by a couple of lost-and-clueless Italian truck drivers! The other truck was loaded with shoe polish so the soldiers could polish up their boots for the event... pull the other one! There are also too many scenes of soldiers traveling through the desert hatless and with minimal gear... at times without even a canteen. In the desert of North Africa you're not getting far without head protection and without water. The actors aren't even particularly tanned... without hats their heads would be sun-burnt! Beyond issues of realism, which can be dismissed in pursuit of a good story... well, there isn't really a good story. The Italians are bombed presumably by the Brits (who are hardly ever seen) and they get their butts kicked, but any battle scenes are left to the imagination in mostly dark shots of night fighting with bombs exploding in the distance. I'm guessing the budget didn't allow for scenes of tank battles, although that would have been nice to include in a movie about a WW2 front where battles between tanks were the essence of strategy and tactics.The film does give a sense of the hot white emptiness of the desert battle front but beyond that it's rather tedious. By halfway thru the movie I was counting the minutes to the end.

This is a good movie of men in war, not a war movie Hollywood style. It shows the madness of war and (at the beginning at least) reminds me of the surreal atmosphere of another great movie, "Il deserto dei tartari". El Alamein - Linea di Fuoco is a movie that gives at last some justice to the brave men who fought and died in Africa for their country, at that time led by a dangerous gambler, not because they were fascists (those stayed far from the battlefront) but because they felt it was their duty. They didn't lack courage or skills but the means of more advanced industrial powers - the German-Anglo-Saxon reputation in warfare being largely due to superior production and logistics. Showing how Italy could fall in love for "Il Duce" was clearly out of this movie scope and reach, but perhaps it will help reading again this quotation attributed to a world expert in this field, Herr Hermann Goering: "People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country". In our days, our leaders do not even have to show us we are being attacked - see headlines for "preemptive war", "Iraq", "Iran"...

How to make a film in Italy.A script that has anything original or "important": war is bad, that's it. But it's a "liberal" point of view, so it's good and it's enough.The same actors seen in every Italian film adding the usual comedian out of a night show (Favino) to have a "known one", and an homage to "bigger names" of the director's circle, giving a cameo to Orlando (Moretti's best one) and Cederna (Salvatore's own).Bad acting: in Italian, every actor murmured in some local "patois", and hardly you can understand what they say. That's a cliché of every Italian war movie, that Italian soldiers uttered strong local accents: war movie or comic film. Not else.Even budget wasn't SO low, no attempt to research what's the right uniforms, vehicles, terms, historical details, as none of the blue-nosed liberal producers wants to talk with the "militarist" who collect or study military history.Spice all with "I'm an artist" attitude, and you have a typical Italian movie.

No heroism. No victory in the end. Only the uneasy feeling of the omnipresent heat, the lack of anything else required for whatever war you're fighting and a growing feeling of despair. Yet the story touched me because it was brought in a way that made it quite believable. The optimistic student who goes to war in the belief that the Italian army will be in Caïro in no time at all, because he believed the public opinion and the promises of Il Duce back home like everybody else did. I must hereby add, that that feeling of believing the story was very much fed by the fact that in my opinion the director and his camera crew knew exactly what they were doing and I also would like to give a big compliment to the casting people. Maybe over the years I have seen better war movies, but not many and certainly not from Italy.