Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers

I have never posted before, never seen the point as some one else tends to have said what I think already but after watching this film I felt compelled to say something.

The only positive comments seem to stem from the amount of time spent on the film and/or the small amount of money it cost so let me tackle this first.

Time spent on the film: If the film took this long then why did it look like it had been improvised the day before? The script was shocking. Why were the camera angles so bizarre and laboured? Where is the evidence of this?

Size of budget: I have not been able to find anything saying how big the budget was so cannot provide a definitive comparison. That said there are numerous examples of people taking small budgets and working them into something that the actors can say they have been in with pride. A small budget does not equal a poor film any more large budgets guarantee a good film. Money should not have made as much of an impact unless it meant that they obtained the services of a director, script writer, camera man etc really cheap because they were in a coma. I could have forgiven you a few small inaccuracies with kit due to a small budget but the deficiencies with the film far exceed anything to do with money.

I have seen excellent performances within theatre performed entirely by amateur dramatists that are on par with professional pieces. You have to take account the woeful script but big questions need to be asked of the person in charge of casting & the director. I'm not going to attack the actors here (though the performances were poor) because even the best performances possible would have been lost within the putrid mire of the rest of the production.

As said previously I would never tell someone not to watch a film but I would strongly recommend thinking again before watching this. Even 'Teeth' (normally my lowest marker) was better than this.

I suspect due to a slight nostalgia mixed with patriotism - we find the vast glut of WW2 dramas and films receiving high ratings on places like IMDb. Some deserve it - like Band of Brothers, other don't.

This films diminished budget seems to have been an excuse to get bad actors who can't deliver lines (but have been told to leave 'poignant'.... gaps.... for dramatic effect). In addition the camera work is bizarre - weird close-ups at strange moments, bad editing and sound that needs normalising to avoid you constantly having to locate the volume control.

Apart from that there's the odd bit of decent dialogue - but not much. The enemy Germans are portrayed in the usual manner all lazy war films do... nothing to challenge the distortions of history here. Oh - and I'm sure I saw a British house looking very up-to-date with PVC window frames - maybe they were back-engineering from alien window tech in the 1940s??

The master plan for the invasion of Nazi-occupied France calls for a small group of pathfinders to set up radio beacons in order to guide the airborne assault. For reasons unknown, the Allied command decides that this mission is to be entrusted to a sorry bunch of third-rate soldiers gathered haphazardly from various units, hence the title "in the company of strangers". Fortunately, the German opposition is made up of utterly incompetent reservists with no combat experience whatsoever.

This movie might have been better as a comedy. A major and a captain discuss the details of the upcoming invasion in a pub! A member of the super-secret pathfinder force visits his girlfriend the day before D-Day! Paratrooper tells funny story involving explosive vomiting!

Not to mention -- weird colors, giving a subtle air of authenticity (or that's what the cinematographer thought, anyway) -- flat dialog -- flat delivery -- and flat combat scenes. Plus, for the true connoisseur, we show an English house in the 1940s with thermopane windows! and an American post-and-rail fence in Normandy!

Don't bother.

*Lousy acting (lots of unnecessary emoting) *Awful sound (muddled in parts, unnaturally sparse in others) *Questionable historical sets/settings (is that even France?) *No directing (everything is in close up!) *Laughable dialog ("Why, you're as ugly as soup!!") *Even the soundtrack is the wrong era (retro big band music??!).

This is just a bad community college play captured on film.

If this movie cost $50, someone spent $40 of it on hookers for the crew.

I understand that this is an Indy film and all, but come on, they made decent war movies in the 50s and 60s with small budgets on the back lot. Why can't these folks (in 2011) come up with at least a watchable film about such an important story?

Three companies of paratroopers travel in a deadly mission to France to prepare the drop zone for the airborne attack on the D-Day. They have to install an Eureka transmitter and searchlight to guide the planes in the Normandy invasion.

"Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers" is a dreadful and lame war movie - maybe the worst I have ever seen. The "untold and lost story" is disrespectful with the true Normandy invasion and the screenplay is awful without character development and poor dialogs. The direction is also awful with permanent close up camera and terrible soundtrack of machine gun all the time. The acting is ridiculously amateurish. The "battle scenes" are so fake and there is one particularly corny scene, when the German soldier throws a grenade in the trench, one paratrooper shows it to the others and uses his body to contain the explosion instead of throwing it back. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Desbravadores: Na Companhia de Estranhos" ("Pathfinders: In the Company of Strangers")

Note: On 20 March 2021, I saw this film again.