Gallipoli (2005)

Somewhere--I cannot find it right now--I have a book about how certain historical events compare to the films made about them, and the dramatized Gallipoli, as opposed to the documentary Gallipoli, is among them. Now, the film freely admits that its characters are pretty much made up out of whole cloth. Only the events that surround them are real. And, I'm afraid, I never really studied much of World War I in school. It's not the war people know anything about. It happened for stupid reasons, and many stupid things happened during it; the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula was certainly part of that. It was spawned from that ever-popular belief that, in this case, Johnny Turk would just give up and let you pass when he got a taste of cold steel. What actually happened on that peninsula in those days gone by would take more telling than I really want to do here; there are any number of good books on the subject, I'm sure--or just watch the documentary. However, in the dramatized film, there are two young Australian runners, Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) and Frank Dunne (a very young Mel Gibson). They both join the Australian Army in 1915, not the best idea for one's continued survival, but there we are. And they are sent into what the British called the Dardanelles Campaign, which involves as much waiting as any other trench battle. We see the boys join, train, fight, and in many cases die. And they are boys--Archy lies about his age to get in. Well. I believe his character is supposed to be eighteen, which was old enough to join, as anyone could tell you. However, the film says that you hade to be twenty-one in order to join, and this isn't true. There is also great debate among those who know more than I about how much the ending battle sequence is accurate to real life. Some say too much blame for the devastation of the troops that is to follow is put on the British command system; from what I can tell, the blame must be spread around quite a bit. (Those firing Turks, among others!) The whole of the campaign wasn't the best thought-out; it nearly killed Winston Churchill's career. It did kill over 7000 young Australian men. So let's leave aside the history for a while and talk about the films, shall we? The Gallipoli documentary is pretty good; it's got Sam Neill and Jeremy Irons doing the narration, and that's always a treat. I can't speak to the accuracy, as I've said, but it does give us a pretty clear perspective on its version of history. It's a good combination of talking heads, period photos, and even a (very) little film footage from the era. We focus on a handful of people on either side of the battle, most of whom were just down in the trenches like anyone else. It's not a great documentary, but it's pretty good. As for the dramatized Gallipoli . . . . Well, first off, I'd like to have stern words with whoever thought a synthesized score was the way to go. It made it sound at times, if you were only listening, as though you'd somehow encountered a sci-fi film from a few years earlier. The acting's a little overblown, but it's nothing compared to the music! The movie is trying to give us a slice of trench life in a place where what happened wasn't quite what you usually got on other fronts of the war, and at that, it succeeds. It doesn't focus much on the actual war, but it does let us see how some young men would reach the point where they would go up over the top and die. And that's why there aren't a lot of World War I movies, I guess. It's all about going up over the top and dying. There's no thrilling treks across enemy territory. There is only the trench and no-man's-land. It's oppressive, and we don't want that for our war movies. We want scope, and there just isn't that much scope when you're hunkered down in a tunnel with the enemy only a dozen or two feet away.