Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

NicolaiLevin Just watched this with my better half on DVD. I had read the books before, she hadn't.I was positively surprised that the writers did not change much of Waugh's novels for dramatic condensation; they just omitted lots of peripheral characters and events of minor meaning to the overall plot.The main characters are well cast and the acting is excellent. In contrast to some other reviewers, I am convinced that Daniel Craig is the perfect fit for his appearing neutral in the crucial point of class. Guy does not represent a specific class in the novels either: He's too catholic and too old for being a "chap" among the officers, he is too introverted and serious to succeed in society, and too rich and educated and considering to be a role model for the ordinary men. No, he remains an outsider to all worlds - which gives him the best position for observing and documenting all the others.My better half liked the acting and thought the film gave her two good evenings of entertainment. Yet she was confused with the abrupt changes of locations and times (I had no problems with that with all the background knowledge of the novels and the dozens of Wikipedia pages I consulted to understand the novel's story while reading it).I can understand her: If you are not really into WWII (and even more: if you are non-British), you really get lost if those sandy rocks now represent mock Crete in Scotland, Egypt or real Crete and what the heck were the British doing in Greece anyway? I don't think it was a good choice to split the story in two parts, while the book is made of three. The story lacks a stringent climactic structure anyway (life seldomly follows the rules scriptwriters have set for entertaining plots), and stopping in the midst of volume 2 does not really make things better. Maybe a 3 or 4 part miniseries with a run-time of 7 or 8 hours total would have been more fitting with the Crete and Yugoslavia episodes deserving a full leg of attention.What I missed was the mentioning of Stalin. In the novel, two of Stalin's moves are main triggers for Guy's decisions: The Hitler-Stalin-pact of '39 convinces Guy to go back to England, join the army and fight the forces of evil. Germany's invasion of the USSR in '41 causes Stalin to change sides which makes Guy doubt his cause. The co-operation of the Allies with Stalin's Soviet Untion forms the quintessence of his conviction of the overall senselessness of his efforts. I can see that it is hard to make this fit into a movie version, but not to mention it at all? I also missed Stalin's sword mentioned although it is the name-giver to Waugh's trilogy.What became clear to me after watching it is that the material is still well suited for movie or series adaptations. So, Netflix, Amazon - anyone?

jjc1-1 How a scintillating trilogy like this could be transformed into a lifeless parody of itself by filmmakers is a complete mystery. It is lugubrious, slow and mistakes slapstick for wit. Waugh would have been appalled by this work. He was a nasty man in private life--a friend of Randolph Churchill whose boorish behavior was legendary--but he had high literary standards. Daniel Craig, incidentally, does not do humor well. The first review on this site must have been written by the movie publicist. The actress who plays his first wife is as wooden as Craig himself -- zero chemistry there -- and there is a supporting cast who clearly didn't have their heart in any of this. A total waste of time, so don't bother. I hope I have made myself clear in padding this out to the full 10 lines required. Left to me, I would have kissed it off with a simple, "No, don't think so. Take your dog for a walk instead."

z28rikard I might sound blunt here but this is a movie recommended to watch only if intoxicated with illegal substances. Otherwise you will either fall asleep or look for a victim to get rid of your frustration. A typical "a'la Stephen King" failure trying to make a movie out of a book. it's like when you listen to a CD book and the narrator is trying very hard to get the listeners attention with a poor try in narrating acting. What did the actors think when they read the script or did they just read the book and trust that the director could get this on the screen by magic.Don't waste your time on this one.

Alice Liddel 'Sword of Honour' can be seen as an update of the Boultings' 'Pilgrim's Progress' - an anachronistic idealist fights in World War Two for reasons of chivalric honour, only to see the world overrun by liars, cheats, murderers, cowards and lunatics; where decency is pointless, even dangerous. William Boyd's restructuring of Waugh's war trilogy is a miracle of adaptation - his leavening of verbal humour with slapstick; his capturing of Waugh's elliptical tone; his creation of haunting visual patterns acting as counterpoint to the horrific satire that is the war. There is one haunting sequence amid so much disintegration, the false bomb warning during Virginia's post-natal party, that magically hints at forces beyond man's self-defeating endeavour, while also rescuing a character Waugh was rather hard on. In the moral sense.