Land of Mine (2017)

the audience applauded

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Harmless, innocent Germans caught in the midst of this bad bad war. Lost, misunderstood and mistreated. Poor things. What a touching story to tell. Technical masterpiece with brilliant actor play I must admit, but a clear attempt to clean wash Germans. The same Germans repeatedly responsible for world conflicts, who exterminated by burning and starving to death children much younger than these hobbledehoys by the thousands. This nation deserves no consolation, nor any kind of compassion. Similarly a picture suggesting that Denmark actually did something during 2nd World War. They've practically surrendered their country to Germans with not one gun shot. Poles defended each inch of their country with their blood, and with no support from any of European countries watching from the distance. Later they've continued to fight Germans supporting other countries all over Europe, even as far as Africa. For which effort btw. Great Britain and USA gave them out to Russians communists on a silver platter. It seems to me that Danes got themselves a pretty good deal. Not many other countries that didn't lift a finger to stop Germans got themselves leftovers from their army to clean up. It's just a funny little story of children playing war far from the real horrors in Europe.

War is a shameful thing. It is the condition of all humankind. It will never disappear as long as there is breath in a human body. This is a perfect psychological dissection of the human condition and its least desirable facet known as war. I think all people that have Pollyanna ideals of world peace should watch this. Sure what was done in the aftermath of WWII was horrible and a disgrace. The only sure thing which would have been infinitely worse was the alternative. Seeing how the German machine treated its fellow human beings during the war, is there any doubt that they would have changed direction had they won. Most cannot possibly imagine the world if Hitler and his minions had been victorious. The sanitized history taught in public schools worldwide doesn't give the full picture. We have to remember Hitler was stopped during this first phase. He never got to any of the later phases. This is a slice of history no one wants to examine. Hitler did draft children in the last days of the war. The criterion was if one could hold a gun steady, he was drafted. Children as young as 8 were made soldiers. This exposes the ever present question in the wake of devastating tragedy. Who is the real monster? Or who is the worse monster? Was it the German war machine for drafting children and putting them in harm's way during a war or the allies using the same children to "clean up" the mistakes of their defeated leaders? I encourage you to watch this movie and be starkly aware that you are looking at the triumphant good guys doing this to the defeated bad guys. Live with that for a while. I gave it 8 stars because it was very good, not near perfect and certainly not perfect. The principle actors were wonderful. The young guys were very believable to the painful resolution.

It's 1945 Denmark after the war. Bitter Danish sergeant Carl Rasmussen berates German POWs. He is given a group of German teen POWs to clear a stretch of mined beach. He cares little for their comfort or even their safety. Soon, the boys are injured and even dying as they starve without food. There is a woman farmer nearby with her daughter. The boys steal feed from the farm but are poisoned by rat droppings.This is definitely a lesser done war movie. Few would make a movie about after the war unless it is the soldiers dealing with the return home. It has a matter-of-fact darkness. It is brutal in a depressing way. The drawback is the failure to accentuate one boy among the group. It would be better to center the movie around one of the POWs, probably Sebastian. It becomes a generalized sadness with human compassion short on supply. When Rasmussen starts to change, it never achieves full hopefulness and I would be perfectly happy without the final redemption.

Just when you think you've seen all there is to see concerning World War 2 and big screen stories, along comes a film shining a light on an aspect of the war that I would imagine very few know much about.Oscar nominated Danish/German film Land of Mine delivers a non-fictional narrative of a true life aspect of World War 2, that being upon the conclusion of fighting during the great war, German POW's (mainly young soldiers) were harnessed by the Danish army to take on the arduous and literally explosive task of disarming over 2 million mines that had been left scattered across the coastline of Denmark at the height of the World War 2 conflict.This little known (at least here in Australia) aspect of post-war Europe allows director Martin Zandvliet a chance to deliver some white knuckle big screen action as our rag-tag group of young German POWS go about their business of clearing out a section of Danish coastline under the often brutal care of Roland Møller's Danish Sergeant Carl Rasmussen.Land of Mine cares very little for adding much backstory or humanising any of these characters for us, we know and understand that what these men and boys on both sides have been through would be nothing short of horrific and instead Zandvliet places us alongside the group as they face a day to day proposition of death as their month long journey to find and disarm mines consumes their day to day lives.You're never under any confusion as to what this task required and it's one of those interesting conundrums as to whose lives were more important as the Danish saw an opportunity as such to get revenge on the German's that had caused so much pain for them, even if many of the POW's tasked with the mine clearances quite clearly were not often at fault.It's a little bit of shame that we don't get to know these characters better as Zandvliet's film pulls no punches when it comes to showing the true bloody nature of the task these individuals undertook but despite the fact Land of Mine's cold approach doesn't allow it to connect to us as emotionally as we could've done with, as an examination of a shocking aspect of post-World War 2 and an insight into a different facet of the war in Europe, Land of Mine is a real must-see.Final Say – A confronting, shocking and sometimes unbearably tense war drama, Land of Mine is a war film like none other and while it never pulls off a true emotionally resonate connection, this foreign language effort is well worth digging up and one of the more impressive war films of recent years.3 ½ games of fetch out of 5