Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

themadstork Godard might very well have set out to make an anti-war movie with Truffaut's comment that a truly anti-war film was impossible in mind, but even judged solely as an anti-war statement this film's a failure. Why? Well for one thing, Truffaut may have been a genius, but on this score he was certainly wrong. There definitely is a danger of aestheticizing anything you put on film, especially if you do it well (think of just how beautiful Sam Peckinpah can make a massacre), but aestheticizing war doesn't mean you can't successfully make an anti-war film. Think of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "The Grand Illusion," or the more recent "Downfall." All are fairly conventional war films and none of them exactly make one want to go out and enlist. "The Grand Illusion," and to a lesser extent "Bridge on the River Kwai," paint a romantic picture of war only to undercut it later. You can't help coming away from those films with the message that, while there might be some nobility in war and the ideals that allow men to fight, both war and the ideals that motivate it are a form of madness. "Downfall" is a completely conventional war film, but it never makes war look like anything other than dirty, terrifying and completely insane. And to me this seems exactly the way one should make an anti-war film. Engage in dialogue with those who might find some nobility in war, admit their point, and try to show what's wrong with it while admitting its appeal; or show just how ugly, brutal, dehumanizing, and insane war is with as much realism as you possibly can. "Les Carbiniers" does neither. It's a smug statement aimed at those who already think that all war is wrong and anyone who fights in one degenerate and evil. People in that camp will no doubt find much to agree with, though little to entertain them, but anyone not so convinced will probably just be bored and angry. And who is it one's trying to reach with an anti-war movie anyway? In the end Godard succeeds too well at making an ugly film. Everyone here is either thoroughly nasty, helpless, or silly. It's kind of like Evelyn Waught at his nastiest, only not nearly as funny. In the scene where the captured partisans are shot Godard seems to me to mock the very idea of human dignity. But what is it that makes war so bad? Isn't it that people get killed? If people are as worthless as this film makes out, who really cares if they get killed? Even Waugh didn't' go quite so far; one always found a few noble fools here and there. The movie isn't a total wash. It might not be Waugh, but it is nastily funny here and there, and Godard was a pretty good craftsman when it came to film. Unfortunately, when you get down to it, this might be Godard's most characteristic film. Godard and Truffaut are often linked, but really ther films aren't alike. With Truffaut one always finds sympathy for his characters and there's just a certain warmth and light touch that permeate almost everything he did. One certainly doesn't find that in Godard. Yes there's craft and cleverness here, but also coldness, cynicism, and a failure to understand, or possibly care about, basic human emotion. To me that's what's characteristic of Godard; it's on display even in Godard's "more accessible" (I'd say "better") films like "Band of Outsiders," but nowhere is it clearer than in "Les Carabiniers," which might make it the best Godard film to start with if you really want to get an idea of the man and his work. Truffaut was a humanist in the true sense of the term, whereas Godard, like too many French intellectuals, subscibes to Ivan Karamazov's line: He loves humanity (in the abstract of course) and hates human beings.

jgc6690 As countrymen fight amongst themselves, two farmers join the fight for riches and fame, writing home to their wives with their view of the battle. Godard used actual letters from soldiers in various wars as a backdrop.The film was originally panned as the worst film ever made. So much so that Godard pulled the film from all distribution. Amusingly thought provoking.The best scenes in the film come during their fighting for "the king". Unknown enemy, speaking the same language and wearing the same uniforms, Godard successfully blurs the lines of war and reason.

Chris Bright While this is certainly not Godard's most enjoyable work some of the negative comments here are world-class examples of point-missing.Godard had already shown with "A Bout de Soufflé" and "Vivre Sa Vie" that he knew how to make a film with style, romance and flair. Therefore it's clear that the crude editing and sound dubbing, continuity lapses, bad acting and overall cheapness on display here were deliberate.What we seem to have here is "War for Dummies". Godard spells things out as if talking to backward children and absolutely refuses to invest his subject and his protagonists with any sort of spectacle or dignity, both by giving us moronic and unsympathetic characters and by refusing the audience any catharsis or vicarious pleasure.Francois Truffaut once said that no war movie can be truly anti-war, since the camera automatically aestheticizes its subject. Godard here goes all-out to disprove that thesis.This does of course make the film hard to watch but it's a deliberate slap in the face, not the result of incompetence.Incidents from many wars are parodied - for example scenes of the women having their hair cut off refer to the treatment of French women who had consorted with Germans during the Occupation. "America" is represented by a car with tail fins and some French tower blocks, in a prefiguring of "Alphaville"s approach to location. Apparently the letters used as intertitles are genuine letters home from French troops in various conflicts, although this does not seem to be made clear in the film.I tend to agree that this is a film for Godard completists only and certainly not the best place to start with his work. The best comparison to make would be with Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" which takes the same crude approach, and apparently the project started life as a stage play.See "Weekend" for a similar approach to 'peace', only with a lot more fun and games.

ericjake If someone were to make a parody of the stereotypical French New Wave Film of the 1960's, Les Carabiniers would be it. I've read Godard has this supposedly great sense of irony, but I think he was dead serious with this piece of garbage.The film was on TCM last night, so I figured, hey it's Godard, I'll broaden my cinematic resume. I shouldn't have bothered. The badly overdubbed soundtrack, the cliched narration, the dumb poetry reading, the ham-fisted anti-war polemics, it was all there. The scene where the younger soldier sees a movie for the first time is quite funny, but the rest of the movie is interminable. The scene where the two soldiers return home with thousands of postcards for their wives (girlfriends, sisters?) seemed to take an hour. Godard's point is as follows: young people are duped into fighting wars by the government telling them they can steal and plunder the world, but in the end you wind up with nothing. Deep, real deep Jean.My rating, 3/10. For the cinefiles out there, see Godard's "Breathless" and then check Godard off your list and move on to someone else.