BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

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

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Stephen Muzz Murray Passchendaele is a decent World War One film, one of the best out there and there's not too many it has minor flaws but does the job brilliantly. Paul Gross has done a great job acting in and directing this film. Some may be put off by the love story but for me this just reinforces and shows the losses of many people during this time period and era. Passchendaele shows how many people who once lived to together as neighbors are divided by stupid things like family nationality and false loyalty and bad promises of adventure and glory. The love story isn't for everyone but wow many girlfriends and wives lost partners and how many young men never came home to true love or had a chance to live full lives? This film does get you thinking!Of course this is no Band Of Brothers in terms of scale (I know that's World War Two) but Paul Gross has done extremely well acting and directly. I find this film to be a good tribute to his Grandfather and to those who lost something because of World War One.The film is low budget however this doesn't really show to be honest and this is a fitting tribute and good story! With regards to the low budget the battle scenes could have been bigger and better but this is by no means a bad film.The acting and casting is spot on and this film really does show the stupid ill placed passion and faulted logic of young people in this era and, it shows the pressure many had to go through and be forced to fight for freedom not knowing what the loses and costs would be. World War One was a slaughter and waste of millions of lives and the deaths of certain characters and the gruesome way they die shows this war was not the fairy tale adventures many painted it to be at the start. Among all the blood and slaughter there is a story and the film does well to reflect and show not everyone fighting was a murderer or cold blooded killer and many just wanted it to end. We need more World War One films like this to teach young people the truths and to keep history alive so we don't make the same mistakes again.

tfmj-1 What a missed opportunity. This could have been a great anti war film but it turns out to be a Canadian Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay's that is) drama with an overblown love story and sometimes terrible dialogs. I could not identify with or care about any of the characters. The battle scenes try to evoke a Saving Private Ryan feeling but they look terribly staged. Thank God it ends after about 2 hours and does not drag on for another hour. If you really want to watch an interesting and compelling movie about the horrors of the Great War I do recommend "All Quiet on the Western Front" (the original as well as the remake) or the Australian production "Gallipoli".

Andrew Zheng When Passchendaele was released, I was excited; finally, a WWI movie told from the Canadians' point of view (which is too often neglected) that would do the horrible conflict justice? I'm in! Then I bought the movie...First, the good; the technical details are pretty accurate! I love researching war and weapons, and Passchendaele's weapons and other technical details are accurate to the time. The battlefields look and feel like real WWI battlefields; wet, often muddy, and miserable. It's obvious that Director Paul Gross (also the main star) did his research.Unfortunately, that is the only part of the movie I can actually praise. Which brings us to the bad...The story hurts the movie a lot. It tells of a veteran soldier who returns to the front to protect the relative of his nurse girlfriend. Told well, it could have added to the movie, but unfortunately the story is told poorly. Add in a few meaningless sex scenes and that hurts the movie even more. It's a war movie after all! We viewers came to see war, not a mushy love story!Next, the stereotypes. The Canadian soldiers are usually portrayed as strong, noble, skilled soldiers, while the Germans are seen as incompetent, bumbling murderous monsters. Example(slight spoiler here!); in one of the battle scenes, the Germans attack the Canadian lines and seem to miss every single shot they fire and constantly fail at any melee combat. The Canadians are shown to be brutally efficient fighters, dropping Germans left and right. For a movie that strives to be technically accurate, the stereotypical enemies deal a major blow to the movie's reputation. In short, a technically accurate WWI movie that fails in just about everything else.

Malcolm Parker Some of the less 'glorious' aspects of life on the home front during WWI are better captured in this film than in any other drama I've seen to date. The ritual humiliation of anyone of age who hadn't joined up and the vilification of anyone one with German parentage were day-to-day occurrences that are rarely mentioned. A fairly good opening battle scene is bought almost to a close with a very curious coup de grace inflicted by Michael Dunne on a young German soldier. This action was so peculiar that I'm sure it must be based on something Paul Gross's grandfather had mentioned to him when recollecting the events of his service during WW1 upon which this film is based. Unfortunately, like several other critical action points in the film, the way it is staged jars as unrealistic and unnecessary. Though it was perhaps significant as a memory, in the context of this film it distracts us from an otherwise interesting narrative and ultimately reduces the overall impact. Later, an iconic photograph of Passchendale - of shattered trees with duckboards crossing an impassible quagmire - is wonderfully recreated. Only to be wrecked a few moments later by out of scale soldiers strolling through the impassable mud alongside the duckboard track. Later still the scene with the faux crucifixion and finally the ranks of tombstones (a very poor CGI substitute for the final scene of 'Oh what a Lovely War'). There was a lot of great material in this film, and the overview of the battlefront and the scenes of hand to hand combat in the shell holes are second to none, but the inexperience of Paul Gross as both writer and director gets the better of him and this is definitely a case where less artifice and symbolism would have produced a better film.