The Hornet's Nest (2014)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

A lot of fun.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

First review of a movie and I plan to keep it short.This "movie" is pretty dang good! I spend hours searching for good suggestions for movies on IMDb, but everyone has a different favorite genre. If you like this movie then here are another few you'll be sure to enjoy:RESTREPO SEVERE CLEAR KORENGAL ARMADILLO BEASTS OF NO NATIONand some actual movies: Lone Survivor American SNIPER FULL METAL JACKET (crazy movie lol) BLACK HAWK DOWN etc.. I could go on forever but these are some good startersENJOY !

The Hornets Nest This was the best war documentary I have ever seen. It made you feel as if I was actually in the battles.Mike B is a true hero for letting the world see what war is really like.Risking his life and his sons takes real courage. My sons watched this film on DVD and they are now much more appreciative of all they have and what our Military goes through.I watched other war docs after but they lacked some of the intensity found in this film. There is a lot of swearing but that is war. Get the DVD as it will be a movie you want to pass on to everyone.

Compared to Restrepo and Korengal, this film falls well short of my expectations. I had such high hopes for this film and was excited to see it. But by the end, I was more disgusted than anything else. I watched an interview with the journalists and they said their ultimate goal was to ensure that from now on, when a civilian shakes a veteran's hand and thanks them for their service, they will know exactly what they're thanking them for. Well, Restrepo and Korengal did a much better job of that than this film did.As a journalist myself, it feels too much like the journalist's got in the way of this film and made it as much, if not more, about them and the rekindling of their relationship (father and son), than they did about the soldiers and America's longest war. In that same interview I mentioned earlier, the father and son journalist team said the film was not a documentary but instead a narrative, indicating that documentaries use too much archive footage etc., which is a broad over-generalization in my opinion. Just because a film is labeled a documentary does not mean it isn't 100% original footage.Restrepo and Korengal, both documentaries, use no archive footage at all, nor do they feature the filmmakers on camera even once during either film. Those other two films focus on the soldiers, their relationships with each other and the war and that's it. And that's where I feel this film falls short. It was a large distraction throughout the film when it kept cutting back to the journalists so they could talk about themselves or in some instances one journalist just filmed the other.With that being said, the film did win a few journalistic awards for its efforts.

For those of us who are civilians, this is as close as we're going to get combat. Considering what you'll see, that's still almost too close.This is a war documentary, not a war movie. I sincerely appreciate that it's on the big screen and not Discovery Channel or the former Military Channel. It has that "Iraq Diaries: Alpha Company" vibe to it...with a bit more danger. I'm also reminded of Sean Parnell's "Outlaw Platoon" memoir.I'm glad I saw it, but it weighs heavy.As an Army daughter, Navy wife, and Marine mother, I have the utmost respect for our Armed Forces. This documentary also shares my respect.