BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Myriam Nys The subject matter itself is deeply interesting : it's a riveting tragicomic story of wit, bravery and resilience under the very worst of circumstances. I'm not sure, however, that the movie rises completely to the challenge. It lacks something - some spark of life, fire, madness.Still, there are many things to like, such as fine jokes and puns. The hard-bitten war correspondent writing from the inside of a bottle - pardon, battle - is an accurate piece of satire. It is a sad testimony to our modern times, that this kind of "reporting" has turned into an epidemic : thanks to advances in technology, every dishonest couch potato between the ages of 8 and 88 can (and will) write/twitter/blog/whatever about events taking place in a remote village in Sudan, with an air of great authenticity and authority.There is also a well-considered sepia palette, which permits a seamless blending with actual historic images. The sight of thousands upon thousands of men navigating the ruins of once delightful cities or moldering away in fetid mud is enough to wring tears from a stone.The movie shows the power, but also the limits of satire. The "Wipers" gazette tries to puncture the pride, indifference and incompetence of high-ranking officials and officers. But does it succeed in effecting real change ? One gets the impression that the brass simply continues on its merry way : no general changes his habits, is kicked out of the army or shoots himself. Worse : the more clever officers graciously allow the gazette to exist, realizing that the men need to vent their anger now and then. Thus the satire is co-opted by the very system it tries to correct and chastise.It's an age-old mechanism, known even to the old Romans : every now and then there was a festival where women could lord it over men and slaves could lord it over masters. There was freedom in the air and dancing in the streets. The next day it was back to business - and it were the slaves, not the masters, who had to clean up the vomit. Or think of the Catholic Church, which, in medieval times, allowed set occasions of misrule, complete with anti-bishops, lunatic processions and fake masses.The movie would have been better and braver if it had dared to examine this question outright, rather than suggest it obliquely.

Prismark10 The Wipers Times is written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman and based on a true story when in 1916 Captain Roberts, Lieutenant Pearson and their men find and commandeer an old printing press and publish issues of a satirical magazine while under fire in the trenches from Harry Hun. The name of the rag is derived from Ypres which some of the troops could not pronounce.The satire is punched home by some sepia tinged sketches bringing a music hall feel. Just as in the film Good Morning Vietnam the superiors are not impressed by the anarchic humour especially against the officers who are sitting far, far behind the soldiers in the trenches.The only exception being the offbeat and shrewd General played by Michael Palin who recognises that behind the irreverent tone is courage, bravery and soldiers just making the best of the mayhem.This is a low budget made for television film starring Ben Chaplin and Julian Rhind-Tutt who act like they are free wheeling it in order to keep in with the satirical tone.It makes a change from the slew of films we have recently had about The Great War which has the theme of war is hell and so many young men died.

trimmerb1234 Ian Hislop is best known as editor of the long running "Private Eye" magazine - satirical; in its earlier days at least, fairly irreverent and often in (expensive) conflict with the rich and powerful. The team were witty, well-educated fellows often from good schools and families having a great deal of fun tweaking noses in a quite tolerant society during an extraordinarily long period of peace and prosperity when satire quickly became the mainstream.Ian Hislop's central and dreadful misconception/misportrayal/conceit is that The Wipers Times was an early version of Private Eye - run by two witty satirical officers for their own and the troop's amusement, raising morale by satirising Army superiors but jeopardising their prospects of promotion by their impish irreverent nose-tweaking and mockery - ie how Hislop would see himself. But neither the times of Wipers Times nor the context could possibly have been more different to those of Private Eye. Nor the conditions under which each worked. The Wipers Times was produced for WW1 troops in their stinking trenches, in constant fear of death but also under martial law where cowardice - widely interpreted - was punishable by death. As was mutiny or insubordination. It was a life or death struggle, with a rigid hierarchy of command where all was sacrificed to victory, where a horse was more valuable than soldier (they cost more in transport and upkeep). Troop morale however was vital so that they would continue to be willing to fight and die. How to achieve improved morale was the question In these harshest of conditions with the narrowest of focus - victory whatever it cost - it is inconceivable that, as portrayed in the film, two officers would be allowed to distribute an under the counter satirical publication lampooning senior officers etc without it being first intensely scrutinised, discussed then officially sanctioned. What was unusual was that there was a senior officer able to understand its contribution to morale and willing and able to convince his superiors of what was a very risky enterprise. In the film all the Stephen Fry character is required to possess is a robust sense of humour. I believe the two officers combined this with their normal duties. If, as in this film, they appeared to have chosen a soft option, or pushed themselves forward, troops who had no such choices would have strongly resented it. Contrary to the film, The Wipers Times did not make celebrities of the two officers, instead it promoted modest but authentic contributions from ordinary soldiers and thus appeared to be the voice of the ordinary soldier - which in reality it was not. Any hint of condescension or aloofness by these two officers - as appears in the film where one casually mocks the social ignorance of a lower rank - might have been, possibly literally, fatal for them. Contrary to the film and verifying its central misconception, the two officers were neither punished nor discriminated against after the war (both had MCs). They had done their duty and more. The troops had fought and died and none had mutinied. The Wipers Times had fulfilled its officially sanctioned purpose - but it had brought happiness, laughter and an easing of the burden along the way.Ian Hislop is a good popular historian of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems he was seduced by the enobling heroic notion that his comfortable late 20th Century satire had its ancestry in the horrors of the WW1 trenches and those two self-effacing officers. The film turned these two men into Private Eye in khaki, worse still, the characters were portrayed as attractive and professional entertainers. Such an idea worked in Oh What a Lovely War. It doesn't work here which cries out for a realistic treatment of a true and important story, giving some idea of the actual characters of these two officers. For all its production values, it is awful.

tyttyvylys In a world wherein we are all too often confronted with the tragic waste that is warfare, this heart-rending and thought-provoking treatment of our world's first war stands tall amidst a cohort of war films that glorify war while trivializing the loss it represents. An entire generation of Englishman were lain down in the mud of the European theater, and while many poets, writers and historians have made much of the tragedy of this affair, few have the courage to satirize it. As only the men who witnessed its absurdity could tell us, this is the relation of Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, two men among many who were forced to endure a what was at times a senseless conflict. Their only hope for sanity in an insane situation was to cling to that which humanizes us all; our sense of humor.If you have ever considered the pointless nature of large-scale conflict, the tragedy of war itself, or the despair of the man as he returns home from the front to a people who do not grasp the enormity of what he has faced, then you must see this film.