At 178 minutes, this war epic is aptly named. It’s painfully slow: almost an hour goes by before a shot is fired. A D-Day drama with an all-star cast (42 international stars, according to the cover text), it tries to be panoramic in scope and ends up disjointed and unfocused. There are way too many characters in too many locations. Indeed, new people are being introduced (with title cards) pretty much all the way through. Weirder still, some of the big names – such as
Richard Burton – are hardly in it at all. John Wayne is miscast: simply too clumsily wooden and ponderous to be credible as a lieutenant colonel. Meanwhile, the Germans are presented as bumbling and stupid, when clearly they were far from that. But the film is so keen to work as simplistic propaganda that it has no interest in humanising the enemy or even crediting them with tactical skills. It’s
self-conscious about its propaganda, too. There are several jarring moments when characters tell each other that this day will go down in history and never be forgotten. The film should
show rather than
tell. There’s not a hint of moral ambiguity. As such it turns dynamic world-changing events into something surprisingly dull.
