Legion of Honor

Sometimes it helps to step outside of the familiar. In "Deserter", my American perspective gets broadened by looking at an Arab country through the eyes of a young Brit placed within the French Foreign Legion. With my own country removed entirely from the scene, I thus start with no default "side" here. The movie does start off following the FFL, but of course expands before too long to show us (some of) the Arab side as well.

I'd like to know, but don't know, how true to reality the movie is. Most of what we're shown seemed very plausible to me. A few bits did feel "Hollywoodized" but perhaps were reasonable distillations of multiple events.

What made the biggest impression on me was the discomfort of Murray as he came face to face with the inexorable underlayment of the whole situation: that military occupation is fundamentally wrong because it is not consensual. That's a good lesson for everyone.

I'm surprised this only has a 5.3. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it's well done and involving and deserves a higher score.

My biggest complaint is that the accents were hard for me to understand, especially near the beginning. With the mixture of different national origins of the characters and some of the dialog being in French with the rest in (mostly) French-accented English, a lot of the early lines were lost on me. I almost stopped watching after about 10 minutes due to this. I'm glad I didn't.