...at least for those viewers with detailed knowledge of the historical context. The acting is mediocre, true, but that wasn't important for me, as I really enjoyed the sensitive approach towards the feelings and the motivation of the young students. Imagine the pre-WWI values, nationalism, the good old "right or wrong, my country", and imagine the tensions on the Balkan peninsula, the rising serb nationalism, two years after the liberation of Kosovo, the "serb Jerusalem", as some call it even today. Think of the cheering masses at the train stations at the beginning of the war, the cars decorated with flowers and crowded with soldiers on their way to the fronts. One nations honor was considered to be worth dying and killing for, and Archduke's Ferdinands visit to Bosnia was widely regarded as (and intended to be) a provocative act.
I recommend to read Ivo Andric's "The Bridge on the Drina", it's last chapters also deal with students of a very similar background (and similar fate).
OK, it's a movie about an assassination, but without showing it. Where's the problem? This is not an action movie, this is "art" :-) A shooting scene with bad stunts, cheap effects etc... would ruin the movie instead of enhancing it.
By the way, i liked the music
P.S. I just ordered the novel...
