i love 1917 and aqotwf as much as the next guy, and i'll watch pretty much anything wwi related, but yall are SLEEPINGGG on deathwatch 2002. i rewatched it earlier today and if you like trench warfare, psychological horror, muck grime and general trench grossness, i could not recommend it enough.
i just. ugh. i have so many thoughts i'm gonna put them underneath a cut. if you read this and/or you have watched this movie kiss me on the lips rn
ok so. objectively lemme hate on this movie rq. is it low budget and are certain characters clearly dressed in certain ways to hide the fact that they couldn't get enough of the same uniform for the whole cast? yes. is a lot of the suspense just characters yelling for someone to do (or not do) something and then it happening anyway? yes. british movie, released in 2002, and the only irish character turns into a religious fanatic and has an affinity for explosives. yes. is andy serkis overacting the hell out of his role? yes. is the acting good otherwise? not really.
HOWEVER.
this movie does a great job at actually incorporating horror elements into the setting. a lot of acting moments that make me cringe end up not feeling too unrealistic when the ground is literally spewing up barbed wire to eat these guys whole. i'm a BIG fan of this movie's personification of trench madness. the sinkholes, the creeping barbed wire, the bodies, the LIVING GERMANS who resemble these delusions enough to make you as the audience question if they're actually even men. that's some DELICIOUS stuff right there.
im gonna talk about this movie like anyone reading this has actually seen it
i love how this movie immediately tells you that they're dead. i'm a bit dense and very easily entertained, so i don't usually catch things like this. the first time around, i definitely didn't. but in hindsight it's so clear from the second theyre in the fog that theyre in some sort of limbo that's completely removed from the saturated battlefield that theyre were just on.
especially once you get around this point in the movie and you probably realize "wait a minute. i never saw this guy get unstuck in the first place. and now he's stuck again." either sergeant tate has an affinity for barbed wire or this is meant to indicate something. if i'm not mistaken, they all die in similar ways as to how we last see them in this opening scene (where they actually die, implied and all that). holy cinema.
obviously our boy charlie shakespeare (dude of all names a writer couldve picked they went with shakespeare. okay) is the main guy. for a while, it feels like all the crazy shit the rest of his platoon is on is happening around him, not to him. like, jennings is losing it talking about reporting for duty with like two guys left and securing a literal infinite labrynth of abandoned trenches. their doctor is slipping into religious psychosis. chevasse LOSES HIS LEGS because he cant feel rats eating through them because he's paralyzed from the neck down. the freak that andy serkis plays actually doesn't change too much. you get it, charlie seems like the only one with a grasp on reality. perchance. when freidrich (german soldier that he spares) tells charlie that he was the only one who's free because he showed him mercy, it was like. okokok because theyre all dead right?? charlie is in his own PERSONAL limbo meant to determine the quality of his character. fuck where all those other guys' souls went idk. does that make sense though. he's the only normal one because it's a test. like in scenes like where he's talking with freidrich and his first instinct is to introduce himself, or when he saves him from being crucified, he always meets pushback from a fair amount of his comerades, like how the military encourages sadistic behavior as long as it keeps you from questioning the system yuppppp.
because it's a test, walk with me here, that explains the final scene where friedrich is left in the trench after charlie escapes and then the original group comes back again in sort of a time loop situation. let me cook. it could be like, each of the guys gets their own limbo and charlie escaped and got out of the trench. say quinn chooses to go insane with the rest of the men in his own limbo and ends up trapped in the sinkhole. but thats just a theory on the spiritual worldbuilding of a low budget shitass movie. it's just me justifying the fact that the main guy is conveniently exempt from mass trench madness. it's what i would like to IMAGINE is the case. and if that's the case, then i would also like to imagine that in his own limbo, doc got out. free my boy he did all of it but idc.
i really like the way they personified trench madness. just an expansion on what i said about the german soldiers, the fact that the first time we see one of them after they've captured the trench, it's almost impossible to tell if he's human, works as a really good example of how in war, the enemy is depicted as inherently subhuman. ykyk. but ofc by the end, he's kneeling and begging for mercy before quinn shoots him because this IS a human!! they just got there!! they haven't even scratched the surface of the horrors yet!!!
going back to charlie's test and military conformity, the scene in the sinkhole where he sees himself with his comerades as they could have been if he stayed with them (if he fell into their influence?) shows us that while he ultimately chose the morally right option, the choice of conformity and cruelty would have offered him a spot alongside his fellow soldiers. i don't think i've ever cooked so hard on an analysis before. it is always that deep to me.
also like??? let's just take a moment to appreciate how GROSS this movie is. never in my life have i seen a muddier film. we have MUD. we have RATS. we have BODIES. we have RAIN. we have BLOOD. we have GOONING(???). we have NO CAMRADERIE because fuck the notion that war is the only acceptable way to form strong male bonds. these guys are fucking miserable and it's genuinely just a desolate movie. no notes!!!! that is how you do a wwi movie!!
i'd reccomend this movie to anyone who wants a kind of stupid, kind of profound, very gross and very shitty movie about wwi. it's so bad 5/5 i love everything about it
when your squad small but yall crazy!!!!
side note: learned while double checking the character names that apparently one of the actors in this movie (lawrence fox, guy i crossed out in that picture) is the leader of the british reclaim party which from a very light skim is like???? genuinely the nazi party of britain like further than reform. what the fuck. alright. fuck that guy
posted this on insta already but the quality there is so bad so I want it here too. I need more people to know about this movie and I need more supernatural horror about war NOW
deathwatch (2002) // along came a spider - czesław śpiewa
