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Top Critics (17)
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DVD (17)
A big, impressive slab of drama -- maybe not a masterpiece or an epic, but a colorful story that sweeps you up and covers a lot of ground at a fast clip.
'The Reconstruction,' which clocks in at 2 hours, 43 minutes, with not a single extraneous frame, elevates the work from a robust genre film to a full-blown epic.
The director's gift for bare-knuckles lyricism rescues scene after scene.
If you don't elect to watch The Big Red One through the lens of Sam Fuller's mystique ... you'll realize that it has been celebrated in ways that essentially make virtues of its flaws.
In its own rough and still unfinished way, The Big Red One works -- as a memoir of a time, and a movie of the war.
Alas, the lost version of Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One of 1980 has been found -- reassembled, actually, by the distinguished film critic Richard Schickel -- and it's a lot less than legendary. It isn't even very good.
... if you want a World War II story from a real vet's perspective, Sam Fuller is still the man and The Big Red One, drawn from his own war experiences, is the film
Personal observation bleeds out of every scene, and somehow it feels like a true story in a way that most war movies can't achieve.
... displays both raw power and the hint of war's brutality.
... one of the great films not just about WWII, but the experience of war itself.
meant to be the culmination of a life's work... It didn't come to pass.
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction... stands as a riveting renovation of one of the most underappreciated war dramas of our time.
A very good film reconstructed into a classic, Fuller's WWII epic is not to be missed.
The cast smartly underplays things, with Marvin being as charismatic as usual playing a man of few words. And Hamill, an actor given to over-the-top outbursts, reins it in here; this may be his best big-screen performance.
These places were where Fuller himself served during the war, and he imbues these stories with the same gritty detail he probably delivered telling them over a beer.
Schickel's painstaking work elevates The Big Red One into the pantheon of the all-time great war films and gives it a fullness that the original only suggested.
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