Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

grizzli-2 I don't understand how or why this movie was so much criticized. I just saw it on DVD and found it excellent. It's completely different of what Godard usually does : I tend to be a little disturbed by his systematic use of quotations (a good example is the recent "Eloge de l'amour"), and there is no such thing in "Les Carabiniers". The dialogs are completely pure, and there is a very clever use of enumerations, which seldom happens in a movie. Great scenes, like when the girl demands to tell a poem before she's executed, when Michel-Ange discovers the cinema, when Ulysse and Michel-Ange show Cléopâtre and Vénus the treasures they brought back from war... It's simple and beautiful.

ericjake If someone were to make a parody of the stereotypical French New Wave Film of the 1960's, Les Carabiniers would be it. I've read Godard has this supposedly great sense of irony, but I think he was dead serious with this piece of garbage.The film was on TCM last night, so I figured, hey it's Godard, I'll broaden my cinematic resume. I shouldn't have bothered. The badly overdubbed soundtrack, the cliched narration, the dumb poetry reading, the ham-fisted anti-war polemics, it was all there. The scene where the younger soldier sees a movie for the first time is quite funny, but the rest of the movie is interminable. The scene where the two soldiers return home with thousands of postcards for their wives (girlfriends, sisters?) seemed to take an hour. Godard's point is as follows: young people are duped into fighting wars by the government telling them they can steal and plunder the world, but in the end you wind up with nothing. Deep, real deep Jean.My rating, 3/10. For the cinefiles out there, see Godard's "Breathless" and then check Godard off your list and move on to someone else.

Nazi_Fighter_David Similar to Ingmar Bergman's 'Shame' is Godard's powerful parable of war, 'The Riflemen.' Godard has stated that 'In dealing with war, I followed a very simple rule. I assumed I had to explain to children not only what war is, but what all wars have been from the barbarian invasions to Korean and Algeria, by way of Fontenoy, Trafalgar, and Gettysburg.'Michelange and Ulysse leave the women when the king's officers come enlist them... They are offered everything... 'Can we loot, burn, rape etc. etc… 'Yes. You can do anything you want,' they are assured... So with rifles on their backs they are off to war... Like Bergman's film there is no enemy... Both sides wear the same uniform, talk the same language and have the same objectives... Nothing is left out of the film, the hate, the humiliation, the rape, but above all we are impressed by the unending and unrelieved scenery of destruction... There is nothing that is natural or alive in the world of rubble...

charlieprince I had thought Tomb Raider was the worst movie I'd see all year until seeing this. The descriptions in the other comments are probably sufficient to describe whatever exists of the "plot." All of the scenes are intentionally absurd, although without the kind of effect this technique has in, say, The Idiots.Many of the scenes are painfully long without meaning, and feel like filler, which is surprising given that the movie is allegedly short. The worst instance of this comes towards the end, with the 20 minute sequence of laying down postcards one at a time in front of the camera, with a voice-over saying "Boat, airplane, bicycle...." The humor of the situation, and the attempt to poke fun at capitalism, is effective for the first minute or so, and very obvious, but the rest is just unwatchable. Next, the acting is awful. The main characters are consistent, if boringly one-sided, but many of the characters they interact with performed so poorly it distracts from the film. In one scene where some prisoners are being shot, there is a two to three second lapse between when the gun goes off, and when the girl being shot (about 15 feet away from the gun) jumps/jolts as if she'd just been shot, and then slumps. It's hard to believe that this sort of stuff was intentional, as Godard was clearly trying to make a political statement, not an Ace Ventura slapstick comedy, although in instances it unwittingly gets closer to the latter.The editing is what really got me though. The pathetic use of stock footage makes Ed Wood look impressive. The attempts to merge the pictures of a small handful of people running, supposedly in battle, with stock footage shots of tanks and planes, felt like a Saturday Night Live skit spoofing the stock footage. And the overuse of stock footage reminded me of the infamous B-movie "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster" with endless collages of stock footage, interspersed with shots of 3 or 4 people and a cardboard-looking tank. The worst example, and completely unexcusable, is a scene where the star pulls the hat off of a girl who has ambushed him, and then the film cuts to a close-up of the girl's head -- and the hat's back on her! It's like Godard wasn't even trying to make a decent film.In the end, I don't think the film got beyond an unsophisticated grunt "War is stupid, capitalism is stupid." Whatever cheerleading pop-culture value the film may have had during it's time, today it's an utter waste of a movie, with an inexcusable plot, wooden and boring characters, awful acting, and editing that would get an F in a basic film 101 class.