Imagine the King Leonidas meme screaming in your face:
WAR!
IS!
NUANCED!!@!!!!
Followed by subtlety & believability getting kicked screaming into a bottomless pit in glorious slow-mo.
This film is supposedly tackling a sacred cow of Polish war history (and national mythology), namely the heroic defense of Westerplatte against all odds. In doing so, it asks us to scratch beneath the surface of the heroic warrior narrative and see the reality of that event, in all its complexity and nuance and human frailty, warts and all. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to appreciate this nuance when the film spends two hours beating our skulls with a sledgehammer and screaming in our faces about how complex and subtle the real situation was.
The characters seem to have two emotional settings: zero and ten; catatonic and hysterical, stoic and screaming. This is not subtlety or nuance. It's binary, and it rings false. The performances are soap opera melodramatic, with lots of Drama School overacting. The old 1967 version is so much better in every respect.
How can the Number 1 & 2 ranking officers spend several days issuing contradictory orders and directly undermining each other without the entire thing falling to pieces? That's absurd. Either the commanding officer would lock up the second-in-command for direct insubordination (and perhaps treason) and get on with business, or that guy would go through whatever military procedure is available to relieve his commander of duty, and then take corrective steps to right the sinking ship. You can't spend several days in the middle of combat with the top dog issuing orders and his underling simply saying "no" again and again. This is absurd.
