Churchill A boring, cheesy movie.
Juhu, a film about Churchill, about the Second World War! A film in which even the history student can leave his desk without a guilty conscience and make his way to the cinema. But there immediately the first disappointment: Even in a movie about Churchill you are not allowed to smoke cigars in the cinema.
To mitigate the second disappointment from the outset: The darkest hour is not a comprehensive Churchill movie, not even a comprehensive Churchill-in-World War II movie. It is all about a few weeks in May 1940, from the appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister to the rescue for the British soldiers trapped in Dunkirk. To the latter, however, there was recently a separate film.
Because this blog is often accused of war-destroying negativism, I start with the positive: Churchill is not over-heroized, but quite as a person portrayed with weaknesses. As a politician, he has a clear idea of value, but he does not have a plan. Or, to quote one of his critics from the movie, he has a hundred new plans every day. The Battle of Gallipoli, a devastating World War I landing company, was also mentioned in one of Churchill's grandiose ideas. But for most German viewers the short mention of Gallipoli should mean nothing, because this battle, like the whole of the First World War, is not anchored in our collective memory as much as with our Anglo-Saxon friends. I first found out about it in Australia when, on April 25, I witnessed a military parade commemorating the loss-making battle in Turkey, where in 1915 almost all of the then Australian Australian and New Zealand male youth lost their lives.
But I'm digressing again. That may be because, and so we have reached the end of the positive part of this review that pulls me the darkest hour right in the spell. Gary Oldman was much praised for his portrayal of Churchill, but I failed to see what it was for. For example, you notice at first glance that he does not like to smoke and often holds the cigar in his hand or in his mouth without being ignited.
At least the part I could have played more relish.
One of the secretaries gets too wide a room, as if she were the second main character. Of course, Lily James' distractingly played Miss Layton has a brother who is in Dunkirk, so she sometimes drops a tear when she reads commands. This is striking for Churchill, who therefore takes her into the secretive map room and explains to her (and thus to the spectators, who did not understand it before and who would not know without helpful inscriptions, where Belgium and the Netherlands are) again the drama of the situation
That's pretty cheesy.
It becomes unbearably cheesy, however, when Churchill goes to work by subway (which is historically wrong, of course) and comes into conversation with clichéd average Britons (a bricklayer, a young mother, an even younger couple, a colored subject of the crown), that confirm him all, never give up. Even a toddler calls "never surrender!" Because the front in France and the victory over fascism are more important to him than a strawberry ice cream. Even in Soviet propaganda films, I've never seen such a unbelievable scene.
Save the two hours and buy Winston Churchill's own book on World War II for the money. While not entirely objective, Churchill was not only an excellent speaker, but also a good writer. Not for nothing did he receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his World War II Mormons.
Or fly to London for little more than the cost of going to the cinema and visit the Cabinet War Rooms featured in the film, the underground command center during World War II (where entry costs a hefty £ 18.90), and the Imperial War Museum (Free entry).