Reviews

Decent structure and good pacing. Avoids repetitive narration and infusing bombastic music into every piece of chilling footage, and also there are no dramatizations - it is all archive footage.

Unfortunately it fails to use historians/experts in a more meaningful way. It resorts to using their words in a very hasty way - sometimes just a few words instantly followed by another word snippet from another expert - might as well as just used the actual narration. This is a shame as the expert interviews themselves do not feel too scripted and many of them were apparently quite qualified historians.

The film has some good moments, but it just lacks too much in important areas: the script is sloppy and the main character is undeveloped, and as a result the is little dramatic tension.

A lot of the narration is conveyed via black & white flashbacks, and after a while they begin to feel pretty tiresome. No true motive for the main character's vengeance is given until later in form of a flashback. Supporting characters seemed to get more screen time than the main character.

Style-wise the film is a weird hodgepodge of calm small town scenery, mockumentary-look and the aforementioned black & white flashbacks. Music is generic and there's too much of it.

Yes, it is set in a war and the obvious sentiment is anti-war and slightly propagandishly (considering when it was made), but the events themselves progress and unravel a lot like an action/adventure set in the desert. Not a lot in the film make sense militarily.

I liked how the T55 (masquerading as a T62) tank itself was depicted. Despite some obvious liberties taken it was still believable enough - mechanical, heavy, slow, alone and broken, but formidable as soon as the turret begins pointing at the viewer.

Bonus point for letting the American actors just speak American. Fake foreign accents ruin the naturality of acting.

The acting, filmography, set design and music are good, but the plot becomes a tad too muddled and it is built too much on top of events the film never attempts to explain. Psychic/supernatural powers at work are strongly suggested particularly the way it depicts hypnosis in a not very plausible manner. I didn't buy into the world of this film and for that reason the scares and thrills lost their effect.

Perhaps I simply set the wrong expectations by thinking I was going to see a psychological thriller confined by natural laws instead of a supernatural psychological thriller.

It quickly became clear I really wasn't really going to enjoy watching this documentary: this has been edited in the typical style tailored for short-attention-spans: the subject changes all the time, the person being interviewed changes all the time and music begins and stops all the time. Most of the interviews end up being just one sentence long soundbites often seemingly taken out of context. The doc spends little time trying to answer the question what actually made this studio so unique and separated it from the rest.

Then the last third takes a bit bizarre turn and the doc turns into a dragged out minidoc of a recording session, essentially becoming an egostroke of Dave Grohl and his old buddies (they literally had a product to sell - the album they made and later released as an official soundtrack). The film probably should have ended before this last segment.