This, together with Nolan's following, was among the shortest films I've ever seen. A short runtime doesn't necessarily mean that the film is bad: take, for instance, the aforementioned "The Following". In this case, I felt like seeing a spin-off 1-hour special that is inspired by Band of Brothers more than else.
I'd like first to state that I'm not a guy who mistakingly got in this film, and because of its slow pace, its lack of action, figured it being a bad movie. I actually found its pace one of the positive things, but I want to write about what was good in this film in the conclusive part of the review.
I hoped to see a film with great visuals. Sure, there were some, but most of the film felt very fake, even for a film. Just like Eastwood did in Letters from Iwo Jima, Olmi had for the film a very desaturated look. Unlike in Iwo Jima, in this film it made everything feel very artificial, it revealed the studio lighting (it felt very evident that all of the night scenes had enhanced studio lighting or were shot at daytime and darkened in post production). This aspect distracted me a lot.
The story is set during one single night, and focuses on a very small group of troops. The premise was interesting, and, if delivered better, could have made a good film. However this is not the case here. In fact it felt like the war was being fought somewhere entirely else, and they weren't involved if not during the two bombing scenes. Now, at the end, the film makes it clear that this is a film that has the ambitiousness of retelling generally WWI on the Italian front. I don't know if it was because of the lack of funds or budget, or an intentional choice, but Italian cinema already proved that can sustain a film with a larger budget (and displaying battles as well): Uomini Contro by Francesco Rosi. While Uomini Contro is generally considered a great WWI film, I personally feel it aged less well than, say, Sergio Leone films, hence a new retelling of WWI on the Italian front wouldn't be a heresy, but this film felt too small scoped and in fact too short to be able to retell WWI. It shows a very limited range of the aspects of WWI: the nearly impossible demands made by officers, bombings, fear, weather-related difficulties, desperation in war. Not once it addressed combat, the mere existence of an enemy, gas (it is set in 1917, when gas was copiously deployed in the war), to be fair, it couldn't make feel tension to the viewer.
Two things it did well: it displayed italians the right way (Rosi's Uomini Contro didn't work that much on this aspect). Italian troopers of WWI, due to their regional provenience, talked to each other in very different dialects and sub-languages. During this film, most of the characters do so. Another thing was the slow pace. Due to its limited time frame it was able to show how slow war sometimes is. That said, I didn't feel that this movie brought anything new to the table. Not new wonderful shots of WWI which today's technology could give to us, not the feel through a modern film of the tension, but rather the usual aspects of degradation and misery in war that many other films delivered better.
