DVD Report
Jason Katzman
How do soldiers survive war? One gets the impression in director Ken Burns' fascinating, powerful documentary on World War II, appropriately called The War, that most of them enter war and survive it because they don't know what to expect. When the worst happens, they often have no training or experience to know how to deal with it. Most can't process the horror that they see. If they did, they wouldn't be able to function at all.
Burns knows well that there are too many stories for any one documentary to do justice to WWII. Because Burns is such a great filmmaker, he tells the larger story through the experiences in four American towns: Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Luverne, Minnesota; and Waterbury, Connecticut. The film is still 15 hours long, but this six DVD set is gripping throughout and, like Burns other films on the Civil War, the history of jazz and baseball, and boxer Jack Johnson, essential viewing.
Somehow Burns manages not to get bogged down in any one aspect of WWII. Where any one element, be it military or domestic could easily overwhelm the film, Burns manages to balance all the war's various characteristics and weave them into one fascinating account that unfolds seamlessly.
In order to convey the personal nature of World War II, Burns has sought out living soldiers to interview. Those interviews do indeed make the experience of the war very immediate as these men and women are still so affected by the things that happened to them. And well they should be. It's hard to fathom the death toll of the war. Take the conflict in the Hurtgen forest for example, an odd, nearly worthless bit of land U.S. generals decided to take supposedly in order to secure the west wall or Siegfried line after D-Day. The first two divisions to enter the forest lost 4500 men in the first three weeks and moved less than three miles. Later, during the Battle of the Bulge, much of it fought in miserable conditions, Americans lost 1600 men a day.
While "a picture is worth a thousand words" can sometimes be a cliché, it isn't in The War. Pictures of dead bodies remind us of how young these soldiers were, and of all those lives never lived. It's a painful reminder of how bad war can be and its devastation for everyone involved. The War may seem like an argument for pacifism (but what war documentary isn't?). And perhaps war is the worst of human endeavor, but when the film gets to the discovery of, as narrator Keith David says, the Nazi's "industrialized barbarism," the results of the Holocaust, it reveals the war's nobility. And then, atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we wonder how noble we were despite the compelling argument for their necessity.
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