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Gallipoli Customer Reviews (49 - 50 of 50 Reviews)

Weir's Best Film
This excellent film is probably the best movie made by the talented Australian director Peter Weir. While Weir has a made a number of very good films, notably The Year of Living Dangerously and the recent Master and Commander, the subject matter of Gallipoli is the most serious of any of Weir's films. Gallipoli is the general title for the series of WWI battles in which the Western Allies attempted to force the Dardanelles and knock Turkey out of the war. Some, including Winston Churchill, himslef one of the prime movers behind the campaign, argued that Allied success at Gallipoli would have been decisive. This has been disputed by recent historians. The Gallipoli campaigns were the first large scale attempt at amphibious assault and were an organizational and tactical disaster. The Allied commanders flubbed several chances to beat the Turks. The Turkish defense was tenacious and much of the action became the trench warfare characteristic of much of WWI. The Allies failed, at great cost, though Turkish casulties were also quite high.
Gallipoli holds a special resonance for Australians. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) was the first major overseas participation of Australian and New Zealand troops fighting as national formations. The ANZACs fought courageously, prefiguring the outstanding performance of Australian and New Zealand infantry in both World Wars. Gallipoli appears to occupy the place in Australian history that the Civil War occupies in American life. Australia (possibly also New Zealand) is the only country that regularly celebrates a major military defeat.
Weir's movie is a powerful depiction of the Australian experience at Gallipoli. The story is simple. A pair of friends from Western Australia enlist, are sent to Gallipoli, and one of them dies in one of the famous and bungled attacks characteristic of the campaign, indeed of the whole war. Weir uses this conventional war movie formula in particularly creative ways. A good deal of the movie takes place prior to enlistment. Weir uses these scenes to convey his image of Australia as rural, provincial, starkly beautiful, and in important ways, profoundly innocent. The war scenes are beautifully prepared and photographed. Weir and his team apparently used a careful study of photographs from Gallipoli to construct scenes in the movie. I recognized parts of scenes as being almost identical to some famous photos of trench life in Gallipoli. The scenes before and during the climactic assault are devastatingly powerful.
This film was made in Australia, by Australians, and for Australians. Some important aspects of the story are simply assumed. These are things that would be known by Australians but not by Americans. The infantry assault depicted in the film were diversions and part of the Battle of Suvla Bay, an attempt to break out of the limited beachheads established in the initial landings. Had the Suvla Bay attacks been successful, the Allies would have beaten Turkey in 1915. Suvla Bay almost succeeded and failed largely because of poor leadership and communications. Because of the latter, the sacrifice of the ANZACs was entirely wasted. Australian audiences would know this and this fact gives the ending of the film a particularly bitter flavor. The end of the movie shows the suicidal attack of the Light Horse on entrenched Turkish positions. The Light Horse suffered 50% casulties that morning.

A Human Drama, Before A War Drama
There is a subtlety and a grace to this film that is often dismissed by viewers as being "dull", now that we have witnessed the gore-and-explosion-packed MegaMovies that seem to exemplify the American war experience. This is regrettable. Because this is not an American story - it is an Australian (and New Zealander!) one. When war broke out in Europe, Australia was still a very young, very small, and quite rural country. It is by necessity, then, that this movie is actually more a human drama set against a backdrop of war. The movie introduces us to two characters - very different, but with their characteristic Australian "she'll be right" attitudes, both innately likable - and lets us watch as they move from predictable life in Australia into a world turned upside down. Through their eyes we see the situation the ANZAC troops are in go from bad, to worse, to catastrophic, until the staggering final scene hits us like a punch in the gut.

'Gallipoli' is unusual because it makes the tragedy of war immediate to the viewer. It isn't the story of thousands of nameless dead. It's the death of people you know, which makes it all the more heartbreaking.

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