This movie is a squandered opportunity.
Uwe Boll apparently thought the best way to make a statement about the pointlessness of war was by making a pointlessly long, wound-inducing, brutally ugly and disturbingly unoriginal genre film.
Here, the director had a chance to redeem himself after a series of flops and turds. In Postal, at least, he showed some promise of not taking himself too seriously, and while the end result there wasn't exactly a good film, at least it was entertaining.
But don't believe the hype.
In Tunnel Rats, Boll is aiming for a serious, realistic movie. The film is marketed as being "for the fans of Apocalypse Now and Platoon", which by itself is a patently ridiculous and preposterous thing to say, coming from a film maker who has built his career on lowering the bar on genre films, from horror (Seed) and action (Bloodrayne) to comedy (Postal). By making a "war film", Boll has proved himself yet again as a completely derivative and wannabe director who is not concerned with either originality, artistic impact or entertainment value. What is good in this movie is stolen from other directors. What is bad in this movie is the result of bad imitation or skewed interpretation of the masters, combined with a lot of self-indulgent, amateurish drivel. To compare his works to those of Oliver Stone or Francis Coppola is an insult to the craft.
Nor am I trying to be unduly harsh on the man. I don't care that he is a popular subject of internet ridicule. I only care about the fact that he makes bad movies, with the sort of inane persistence that is mind boggling. And to stay true to his vision, the last 50 minutes of this film are some of his worst yet. Bravo, Herr Boll: job well done.
But let's start at the beginning. The movie opens up with some nice open angle shots, followed by scenes at and around the camp. The characters are introduced, some chatter is spewed back and forth, the setting is laid out in order to be upset by events to come. The characters are clichés, the dialogue is completely unoriginal. There are at least four or five variations of the theme of "I want to go home but we can't 'cos we're stuck here and war is hell." The movie is ridiculously excessive in its repetition of the message of "we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto". Emotions are shown without preparation or care, and we are left without any means of relating to these cardboard figures - shadows, as they are, of American stereotypes.
From the first action scene on, and all the way through the laborious tunnel sequences throughout the film to the final scene, the movie shows signs of some of the worst pacing and cohesion in recent memory. The movie is about as chaotic as war, but that is not cinema verité: Uwe Boll simply happens to be the cinematic equivalent of a shell shock treatment. Maybe that's why this movie is seen by some to be authentic in its demented convolutions, because they think that Boll has created some postmodern masterpiece here. But what they mistake for craft is simply Boll's inability to make a coherent narrative last more than 10 minutes. And because war is all about brutal ugliness, Uwe Boll just naturally happens to have the inherent lack of vision, honesty and skills to drive that point home involuntarily. Boll IS war.
Uwe Boll is the worst enemy to his own movies. He is like the Viet Cong digging tunnels underneath the movie crew's feet, or more like a saboteur within. After he is done, little remains of a salvageable movie. He snips out all developments, abandons all his characters, fails to release tension that he builds up unnecessarily, meanders like a schizophrenic tunnel rat in a maze, throws random scenes at the viewer in a barrage of images that might as well have been edited together using an aleatory computer program or an astrological chart... and finally, he repeats and repeats and repeats the same stupid mistakes of his earlier movies as if self-criticism and self-learning were signs of weakness. The latter half of the movie is an irredeemable catastrophe, as if even the editor gave up on this movie after the midpoint. There is such a lack of love here that one wonders if it's not done on purpose in some cruel, twisted joke.
This is certainly not Uwe Boll's worst movie. At least Seed, Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead are even more disturbingly amateurish. But what makes Tunnel Rats perhaps more distressing than those previous stinkers is its subject matter: war. The film is so dark, gray, boring, claustrophobic and ugly that it's perhaps his least entertaining movie yet. And it certainly fails as a message movie, because it has no intellectual honesty or artistic merit to speak of. So who is it for? What's the point? I really don't know... The film is a completely dishonest hack job, a failure in its own terms, and a complete humour failure to boot.
This movie is ugly, meandering, brutal, pointless and painfully long.
Yes, in that regard, it is an apt representation of Vietnam.
Thank god we're not in Vietnam anymore, Toto.
Uwe Boll apparently thought the best way to make a statement about the pointlessness of war was by making a pointlessly long, wound-inducing, brutally ugly and disturbingly unoriginal genre film.
Here, the director had a chance to redeem himself after a series of flops and turds. In Postal, at least, he showed some promise of not taking himself too seriously, and while the end result there wasn't exactly a good film, at least it was entertaining.
But don't believe the hype.
In Tunnel Rats, Boll is aiming for a serious, realistic movie. The film is marketed as being "for the fans of Apocalypse Now and Platoon", which by itself is a patently ridiculous and preposterous thing to say, coming from a film maker who has built his career on lowering the bar on genre films, from horror (Seed) and action (Bloodrayne) to comedy (Postal). By making a "war film", Boll has proved himself yet again as a completely derivative and wannabe director who is not concerned with either originality, artistic impact or entertainment value. What is good in this movie is stolen from other directors. What is bad in this movie is the result of bad imitation or skewed interpretation of the masters, combined with a lot of self-indulgent, amateurish drivel. To compare his works to those of Oliver Stone or Francis Coppola is an insult to the craft.
Nor am I trying to be unduly harsh on the man. I don't care that he is a popular subject of internet ridicule. I only care about the fact that he makes bad movies, with the sort of inane persistence that is mind boggling. And to stay true to his vision, the last 50 minutes of this film are some of his worst yet. Bravo, Herr Boll: job well done.
But let's start at the beginning. The movie opens up with some nice open angle shots, followed by scenes at and around the camp. The characters are introduced, some chatter is spewed back and forth, the setting is laid out in order to be upset by events to come. The characters are clichés, the dialogue is completely unoriginal. There are at least four or five variations of the theme of "I want to go home but we can't 'cos we're stuck here and war is hell." The movie is ridiculously excessive in its repetition of the message of "we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto". Emotions are shown without preparation or care, and we are left without any means of relating to these cardboard figures - shadows, as they are, of American stereotypes.
From the first action scene on, and all the way through the laborious tunnel sequences throughout the film to the final scene, the movie shows signs of some of the worst pacing and cohesion in recent memory. The movie is about as chaotic as war, but that is not cinema verité: Uwe Boll simply happens to be the cinematic equivalent of a shell shock treatment. Maybe that's why this movie is seen by some to be authentic in its demented convolutions, because they think that Boll has created some postmodern masterpiece here. But what they mistake for craft is simply Boll's inability to make a coherent narrative last more than 10 minutes. And because war is all about brutal ugliness, Uwe Boll just naturally happens to have the inherent lack of vision, honesty and skills to drive that point home involuntarily. Boll IS war.
Uwe Boll is the worst enemy to his own movies. He is like the Viet Cong digging tunnels underneath the movie crew's feet, or more like a saboteur within. After he is done, little remains of a salvageable movie. He snips out all developments, abandons all his characters, fails to release tension that he builds up unnecessarily, meanders like a schizophrenic tunnel rat in a maze, throws random scenes at the viewer in a barrage of images that might as well have been edited together using an aleatory computer program or an astrological chart... and finally, he repeats and repeats and repeats the same stupid mistakes of his earlier movies as if self-criticism and self-learning were signs of weakness. The latter half of the movie is an irredeemable catastrophe, as if even the editor gave up on this movie after the midpoint. There is such a lack of love here that one wonders if it's not done on purpose in some cruel, twisted joke.
This is certainly not Uwe Boll's worst movie. At least Seed, Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead are even more disturbingly amateurish. But what makes Tunnel Rats perhaps more distressing than those previous stinkers is its subject matter: war. The film is so dark, gray, boring, claustrophobic and ugly that it's perhaps his least entertaining movie yet. And it certainly fails as a message movie, because it has no intellectual honesty or artistic merit to speak of. So who is it for? What's the point? I really don't know... The film is a completely dishonest hack job, a failure in its own terms, and a complete humour failure to boot.
This movie is ugly, meandering, brutal, pointless and painfully long.
Yes, in that regard, it is an apt representation of Vietnam.
Thank god we're not in Vietnam anymore, Toto.