The Somme

Some interesting artistic choices taken with this film. It was nice that they tried to give actors a chance to portray several of the characters. The music was nice, it was appropriately somber. I think all modern documentaries do a generally bad job in educating the viewer about the details and properly contextualizing the subject matter, and this one is not great in that respect either. It was an enjoyable watch, but still had many deficits.

Having seen just about every war film and documentary I could in the past usually there is just nothing left that is original enough to watch. This docu-drama however was. Rather than show soldiers in some amorphous "trench" on the western front you could see the low level map of the different fighting and communication trenches they were crossing zooming out to the situation on the whole front. So the drama was not just alongside the documentary but was linked to it.