1944 The Final Defence (2007)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Touches You

People are voting emotionally.

Good concept, poorly executed.

Tali-Ihantala – 2007 This Finnish film comes across as sort of a mixture of documentary and war film. It tells the tale of the Battle of Tali-Ihantala in mid 1944. This is where the outnumbered Finnish forces stopped the Soviet push to knock Finland out of war and conquer the country.It was a skin of the teeth type battle with the Finns just barely holding the line. It was enough of a victory though that the Soviets decided to go for a negotiated peace treaty. They had use for their troops and tanks further south to pursue the fleeing German Army.The film follows several different small units as they are thrown into combat against the Soviet Red Army. One follows a recon unit hiding behind Soviet lines. Another tells about a Finnish Unit made up of captured Soviet tanks and German supplied assault guns. Then there is the story of how the massed Finnish artillery saved the day at the last moment.This is an interesting war film about one of the more unknown areas of the World War Two conflict. It might not be to everyone's taste, but should satisfy the war film buff. Of particular interest is the use of actual WW2 tanks etc.

Being Finnish, it is often difficult to comment on Finnish war movies. Since most Finns have at least an elementary grasp of the timeline and locations of the events, you can understand better what is happening in front of you. This creates a situation where these movies become difficult to follow for other audiences and that's where they usually go wrong.Let's look at the good sides first. The fact that they actually acquired proper vehicles instead of using CGI was a huge upside. The costumes, the equipment looked pretty good. The inside shots of the vehicles were good. However, all of these upsides were not enough to cover up for the confusing direction and weak screenplay. Yes, I said it, the cat is out of the bag.The premise is good, and if the director had chosen to go the route of "A Bridge too Far" or "The Longest Day", this movie would have been much better. The greatest flaws were the lack of character development, sense of urgency from the fighting and overall confusion of what was actually happening. These were so bad that you don't even notice the horrible dialogue.Both of the Hollywood movies I mentioned spent the first hour with character development, and the remainder showing those characters whom you had now developed a connection to, in situations where you as the viewer felt that they were in immediate danger. In T-I, there were no scenes that had the same feeling like Robert Redford paddling across the Nijmegen or the "cricket" scene from TLD.When shooting a large scale epic like this, the HQ scenes must act as the glue that holds all of the action together and keeps the viewer in the loop for whats actually happening. Instead of the overview maps, I would have preferred to see a mapboard and commanders discussing the situation. Now you just see almost identical maps and it seems like the Russians are not doing anything, and the Finns are mounting some kind of counterattacks somewhere for no particular reason. You can see that around 90 minutes (the radio intelligence scene) they did attempt this for a few minutes, which ended up being the most enjoyable part of the movie. Too bad that the action that unfolded ended up being so anticlimactic.I really wanted to like this movie, but I felt very disappointed with it in the end. Also, the English subtitles had some annoying missteps evident in too many Finnish DVD productions; incorrect terminology and desperate attempt to make Finns speak UK English, whereas Finns in my experience speak more like Americans with their colorful expressions.Recommended only for hard core WW2 vehicle buffs. I suggest "Ambush" if you're looking for an actually entertaining movie about this subject.

Like I said in the discussion-threads about this movie: this a documentary masquerading as a movie. There's zero character-development and "drama". What we have instead is warfare. No BS, just warfare. If you expect good characters and all the other things you could find in other movies, this is not a movies for you. But if you are interested in warfare, then this movie delivers.And to comment on the review by Mr. Stensson from Sweden: Continuation War is in fact _widely_ discussed in Finland :). And fighting alongside Germans was realistically speaking the only choice. Allying with the West was not possible, since Germany occupied Norway. Allying with Sweden was attempted, but Soviets would not allow it. Allying with Soviets was not an option, since they kept on harassing Finland after the war, and it was thought that they would resume hostilities sooner or later. And I would say that the West made a deal with the devil as well. In many ways the Stalinist USSR was just as bad as Nazi-Germany was.Like it's name says, Continuation War was a direct continuation of Winter War. Had Winter War not happened, there would not have been Continuation War. And we all know who started the Winter War....Finns never attempted to attack Leningrad, and they in fact voluntarily stopped at the old border in the Karelian Isthmus (well, they straightened the front by going over the border in the middle, but that's about it). Had they wanted to, they could have taken Leningrad, since Soviets had moved most of their troops against the Germans.I would like to know what we _should_ have done instead? And in any case: hindsight is always 20/20. What all this has to do with the qualities of this particular movie is beyond me... If you want to further discuss this topic, my advice is to head to the discussion-forum.

you shouldn't say anything at all. But I'll have to say something. I was so disappointed.When you get your actors from a badly acted Finnish soap-opera, you'll get the level of acting too. Most of the time acting & dialog feels like a parody from a 1950s Finnish military-farce; even when the movie tries to bee precisely accurate to the real incidents or dialogs. In many scenes I felt embarrassment towards the actors. Amount of clichés was overwhelming. 'nuff said.It's understandable that most of the scenes feel lose from the whole picture, as the movie chops the main battles of the Ihantala in different parts. But still most of the scenes feel way too shallow and short. The battle scenes are way too short and clean to be in a war movie. War ain't suppose to be pretty, that is just wrong for the sake of the audience and for the war veterans we want to honor.Sound-world was flat, or the movie theater were I went didn't know how to use the volume. I know that you can't talk with regular tone of voice inside a battle tank, not nowadays and specially not in WW2 era. Weird choice from the director was play the classical soundtrack in-front and the battle noises at-back in few battle scenes, where it would have worked obviously much better in the other way.Well only good thing was that movie was, in a big picture, faithful for the real events. Director did give a notice that Finns lost a lot of ground in the beginning of the Ihantala battle. Unfortunately the movie managed to hide the most intense defense-battles at the end.I could recommend few much better TV-documentaries, more informative, more intense..