Courtesy Miso Film
One might finish The Bombardment and question why the film exists at all. Sure, given current world circumstances, it’s a prescient outing, but prescience doesn’t equal purpose, and in the words of Sunset Boulevard’s Betty Schaefer, “I think a picture should say a little something.” And though conflict being a terrible thing is certainly a message, we were already well-versed in this concept going in. War is bad? No kidding! The result is a flailing WWII film, interesting enough for its subject matter but confused by its own multitude of plots and characters.
Based on the real-life Operation Carthage, during which the Royal Air Force accidentally bombed a Catholic Girls’ School in Copenhagen on the eve of WWII, killing 120, The Bombardment posits that this misstep was a horrible thing. OK, yeah, but adding a doubtful German collaborator (Alex Høgh Andersen) and a nun facing a crisis of faith (Fanny Bornedal, whose character spends her evenings whipping herself to find God) doesn’t add depth to the tragedy in director/writer Ole Bornedal’s newest. Instead, we get a collection of loose threads jammed into an oddly short runtime and a first half trudging desperately along between classic Nazi resistance tropes and children’s fables.
Past its midpoint, the film transforms into Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, wherein unlikely heroes emerge and half the cast sits in rubble. Despite posh looks and cinematography touting far better production values than most middling WWII portrayals, such things can’t fix a hodgepodge of emotional scenes with no discernible conclusions. Was the film’s last quarter misplaced, but Netflix needed to premiere something regardless?
Even erudite WWII fanatics might struggle in deciphering a purpose. Despite bringing attention to an otherwise lesser-known tragedy, is this only to tell us how terrible the whole war thing was? It might shock these filmmakers to know that we, the audience, can gauge such a thing without them crafting manipulatively dramatic and likely expensive portrayals. The Bombardment is an otherwise competent film, passable in the technical sphere and with a few acting triumphs. Even so, a film that thrives in most sectors but its screenplay is not truly success—no matter how many times filmmakers try getting around that.
5
+It looks nice; great acting
-Bad structure
The Bombardment (The Shadow in My Eye)
Directed by Bornedal
With Anderson and Bornedal
Netflix, NR, 107 min
