Sometime, I suppose, it is necessary to witness the bad in order to appreciate the good. So I keep telling myself. Otherwise, I’ve just lost an hour-and-a-half of my life watching Company of Heroes for absolutely no redeeming purpose.
My kid picked it out and wanted to watch it so I watched with him. I would not have watched it on my own. Fact is, I had stumbled across it through Netflix’s recommendations (they figured I’d dig it, of course). After scrolling through some reviews, it was clear it wasn’t really for me. Funny thing, though, it didn’t look all THAT bad.
Amazon, which isn’t all that reliable, gives it four stars. Netflix gives it 3.7 (although, wisely, it says that I would give it only 2.2 myself). IMDb gives it 5.1, which is definitely in the “avoid” category according to their scale.
Worse yet are some of the written reviews, which seem to entirely miss the mark. On Netflix, there are comparisons to Band of Brothers, which is telling. In the post-Saving Private Ryan, post-Band of Brothers world, I (and I assumed everyone else) have a very different expectation for what makes a war movie. See, this movie might fit very well in the A-Team era, where a few vaguely-historical costumes, some official-sounding locations, and lots of running back and forth while shooting was sufficient to make a “war movie.” Digital film techniques allow for even a tight budget production to look much better than it did back in the day. But CGI can’t fool one’s eye into mistaking this for a top shelf production.
One way to make sense of this all is to place it into the right genre. Is this really a war film? Or is it is a video game film? As the latter, things start to fall into place. Now, I’ve often written how I don’t understand various aspects of the entertainment business. The video-game-franchise-films genre goes beyond in its inscrutability. I guess I can understand how a video game fanatic can think, “I’d really like to see my gameplay translated to the big screen.” It is considerably less understandable how a studio can think that converting a game to a movie is going to make them money. Although, when one looks at the box office returns from Resident Evil, I guess one’s imagination can be stimulated*.
Further motivation might be gleaned from the timing. The movie was released shortly before the Ardennes Assault single-player DLC package. I can’t speak** to the content of that game, but was this meant to be a giant, 100-minute advertisement for an upcoming product release? If so, it wouldn’t be “losing money.” The budget would be classified as “advertising spending.”
I could criticize Company of Heroes point-by-point but what would that actually get any of us? The whole production is sloppy – from historical/military accuracy to a ridiculous representation of guns and weaponry to simply half-assed writing and stupid music. What isn’t kind of silly is simply formulaic, including that gratuitous T&A which serves no purpose except to sell more tickets to teenage boys. There’s this subplot which seems to be unable to tell the difference between Poland and Russia – although I can’t tell*** if it’s a character who makes that mistake or if it was the writers.
My boy ended up falling asleep partway through. I think his time catching up on his rest was better spent that the time I watched this drab, video game conversion.
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*I was about to insert a joke about just how one’s imagination goes about being stimulated by Milla Jovovich, but I thought better of it. As lacking as I am in writing skill as a blogger, that’s nothing in comparison to my awful sense of humor. Suffice to say that a movie with Milla in it might tempt me even though I knew for sure it was going to be awful.
**I actually own Company of Heroes and Company of Heroes 2 (including the Ardennes Assault campaign). I’ve played a little bit of the first but have never installed the newer version. I’d be tempted to whip out Ardennes Assault just to see how it ties in with the movie but I read that the game is really, really hard. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
***The “Pollack,” who is a devoted servant of the Soviet Union and speaks Russian, has to correct the errant character who attributes a Cicero quote to Shakespeare. I don’t remember the line and I’m not masochistic enough to rewatch the movie just to look up the quote. Point being, the whole sequence may be set up to show the audience a Russian whom we will all think is stupid but then to show us stupidity is in the minds of the beholders. Seems awfully subtle for such a ham-fisted production, though.