Long, gruelling, realistic...I watched it in four tranches because it was too much all at once. My first thought was that this was actually like being there...without the smells, of course, but with lots of noise and mud and gore. But on reflection, it's not - the cinematic "God's Eye" view means that you see the enemy approaching as you would if you were, because the camera keeps cutting from one side to the other, and providing longer views so that the watcher can understand what's going on. Which means it's not like being there at all.
It does capture the randomness of death and the awful pathos of war, even though this was mainly a war in which combatants died and civilians didn't - perhaps it was the last such war.
I have a dim memory of the first film on the book, and this includes things that I don't remember being in that, as well as leaving out some of the poignant details from that - wasn't the protagonist a butterfly collector? Doesn't he die reaching for a butterfly?
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