Warsaw 44 (2014)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Fantastic!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I am both Russian and Polish and am deeply interested in Warsaw Uprising films. Such as The Uprising was a great, huge film. This one gave some promise, too - made by Poles for Poles and in Polish. I was expecting best but I got almost worst. What went wrong? Well, several things. First, and this kills the whole production, all these totally unnecessary Doom or superhero style scenes depicting kissing, bullets flying all strange trajectories, hugely false, wrong and laughable love scene, and on top of that, this Dooom shooting scene that killed the whole message. Second, obvious nods to Private Ryan and all new US war epics with all that shaky camera, blood, loud dusty explosions, zipping bullets and deafening noise. What worked in USA did not work here. Third, really weak and generic performances of several young actors, leaving almost no hope for improvement and change. Fourth, poorly depicted events and hurried delivery, which seems to be a very amateurish attempt of re-creating The Pianist or Schindler's magic but fails flat here. In general, weak and floppy.

For emotion I give it 10/10.Plot was reasonably interesting, there was some character development, however the main character's actions during the film were often questionable.I felt that they basically threw together random facts and then hammered it together into a story and threw a love triangle in just to make it interesting.Some historical facts were covered hurriedly and not explained or emphasized clearly. The fact that all buildings were to be destroyed unless Poland surrendered was very hurriedly mentioned.Furthermore the combat did not seem representative of the statistical kill ratios as recorded. Statistically the number of Polish resistance casualties was similar to the number of Nazi troop casualties. In the film the Polish troops seem to drop like flies and you almost never see any Nazis being killed, except for in room to room engagements.I also believe that some of the scenes were unnecessary, the unrealistic kissing scene.Overall I enjoyed the film until I thought about the plot after finishing the film. To me the plot felt unsatisfying, but this is my subjective opinion.I must however praise the film for trying to include as many historical events as possible.However I am irritated at the lack of any mention about the weapons manufactured by the resistance. During the Polish uprising, the Polish underground manufactured nearly 1000 Błyskawica submachine guns. I saw none of these during the film. I know it's costly to make a functioning replica of this, but they didn't have to, they could have made a non-functioning replica and had some of the men carrying them. They didn't even mention that they were manufacturing this or that they were manufacturing VIS pistols. You do at least see 1 VIS pistol during the film.

Jan Komasa's "Warsaw 44" is an audacious and impressive, genre-blending pop-cultural epic war or, as some might put it, anti-war motion picture that hits the nail on the head with unusual and daring vision from an unknown director from Poland. The story is as simple as it gets. It's just before the summer of 1944 in occupied Warsaw, Poland. Nazi's are retreating slowly leaving the eastern front behind. The Second World War is coming to its end and clearly new order is about to be established. Poland, which had suffered numerous tragic blows of fate in its history, finally has a chance to prove its right for independence.Stefan (fresh, unobvious and heavy on delicate retro 40's charm Jozef Pawlowski) is the only breadwinner after he lost his father at the beginning of the war. In order to make it and get by with his grief stricken mother and younger brother Jas Stefan unlike his peers is away from getting involved into polish resistance rebellion preparing for the uprising against German occupation. It takes an unfortunate event for Stefan to be forced to join the underground polish Home Army where he meets his old friends and a girl – Alicja (brilliant Zofia Wichlacz). Stefan keeps his new engagement secret from his troubled mother. And then one day surprisingly to everybody involved there comes an order to start the uprising, which is meant to last three days but eventually will lead to a bloody apocalypse.From the beginning of the movie we experience a visual orgy of different genres mixed together dipped in a salsa gravy of brutal and bloody scenes provocatively shot in a very colorful and even at times fairy-like manner with a little bit of ironical kitsch unlike a typical war cinema has made us to expect. Komasa insanely puts young actors on an emotional roller coaster where things resemble a nightmarish Klimov's "Come and see" crossed with a Disney fairy tale juxtaposing a slo-mo of bullets circling around the kissing lovers with the downpour of blood and guts in one of the most gruesome scenes to be shown in cinema. The way of storytelling makes us follow the characters but surprisingly not because of their psychology, which seems as simple in construction as it gets concerning the fact that we watch people in the middle of unleashed hell where they can only escape or take cover occasionally shoot a bullet at an invisible German enemy. At first you would like to have characters which are more proactive but then - hey! It's war, not another Rambo movie. The characters are tools or goggles through which a viewer can experience the simulation of the world, which does not pretend to be Warsaw from 1944 either. It's more of a dreamy creation, a fantasy, phantom all coming from the director's mind bravely composed with uneasy feeling of disappointment, as if helmer writer wanted to express his doubt whether we would ever let it go and just live together not minding differences in this Babel world. Whoever is seeking realism, regular narrative war movie and psychologically twisting drama would feel disappointment watching "Warsaw 44" since it's a rare, provocative, ambitious and original gem, a super budget experiment on one of the biggest and most horrifying events in XX century, a bloody opera staged before our damned eyes to show us the fire we lit up ourselves once in a while in the name of hatred and self-destruction.

If I can summary this movie I would have to do that in two category:Historical accuracy - 10/10 Story and emotional roller-coaster - 9/10This film is a short introduction to the real history of Poland. It speaks through the the young people whose real live in Warsaw between the end of July 1944 and the beginning of October 1944 looked exactly how it was shown in the movie. Absolutely amazing accuracy of the depicting of some events and episodes of the Warsaw Uprising 1944. If you think it's exaggeration, IT'S NOT (even the scene with blood and humans' remains falling out of the sky is authentic)!!I know the famous scene with the kiss looks strange from first view, but this is 'ars poetica', it was (and it's) to show what's going on in the hearts of those young and inexperienced people.What film is not - it's not documentary movie and above all, it's not another fake-story Hollywood-like movie (see e.g. absurd and actually stupid series of war movies with Brad Pitt).I could not sleep after watching of this film and there were many like me. I don't think there is a normal person who would see this movie (knowing that the story inside is the real depict of real events) without any emotional reactions. I really recommend it. YOU MUST SEE IT !!!