When I learned that Angelina Jolie had set her feature film debut as a war movie, she felt bad. War movies are a type of film that is not easy to grasp. There is no certainty. It’s difficult to present it to most viewers because of his intellectual accumulation and mastery skills. Sometimes, it’s hard to even look pleasing to the eye at the very least. This time Julie really picked a tough one for herself.
Although the spirit of daring to challenge difficult and sensitive war-themed films is commendable, it is undeniable that Julie’s first feature film "In the Land of Blood and Honey" was made in a relatively naive way. Long, slow-paced, monotonous narrative techniques, lack of fluency in plot advancement, thin and flat characterization, abrupt and deliberate emotional expression, missing the necessary step-by-step and inheritance, the most regrettable thing is that Julie touched the waves of the early 1990s. The stance taken by the Black War is unfair and objective, as can be seen from the setting of characters such as the second generation of the Serb high-ranking official army and the Muslim civilian literary girl in the film.
Although it is said that “the first sacrifice of war is the truth” (by Hiram Johnson), and further, “random truth and necessary truth constitute life” (by Leibniz), but a relatively objective and rational interpretation should be welcome of. Of course, the Bosnian female director Yasmila Zbanik’s film "Gbavica" can start from a single point of view, because what she touches is the pain of the nation, but if it is the so-called "third party." It is also one-way recurrence, and there is some suspicion of lack of head-up, which is easy to cause unnecessary trouble. Although this "third party" inevitably carries Western perspectives and ideas.
It is said that Julie’s original intention was to reproduce the human nature and life changed by the war. So, she spent 127 minutes presenting the life in which the people in the film were changed by the war, but she did not show enough humanity in the war. It seems that from the beginning, the Serbs in her script were strong and cruel. But in addition to these problems, it is worthy of recognition that Julie expressed the fragility and emptiness of human emotions in the face of war with this "Romeo Juliet" love story that could not have occurred in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The strong feelings are weak and helpless in front of the huge monster of war. Guns and roses are the products of two atmospheres. If they are placed in one place, they will either be dazzling or wiped out.
Perhaps because the narrative structure is not balanced enough, many dramas in the film that need to express the inner world are treated as defaults. Many of them lack the necessary explanation and coherence, which seems to use the wrong direction and the wrong force. This directly led to the tragic drama of the last "Love Lost War" appeared weak and powerless, and could not achieve the desired movie viewing effect. However, it can be seen that Julie was very serious about preparing for this shot, and at least she was sincere. She even shot two language versions for the film, the English version and the Bosnian version.
It seems that for this film, which is one-sided, lacking in structure and not enough popularity, the audience is too demanding because of a certain expectation of the movie, and the nomination for the Golden Globe has raised this expectation. Objectively speaking, as a director’s debut, Julie should be considered a pass, at least the film was very patient, many scenes are very dynamic, and there are acceptable emotional expressions, such as sister Laila holding the corpse of a dead baby and raising her head. The sorrowful scenes actually give people a sense of "question from heaven".
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