Reviews & Ratings for
War Requiem More at IMDbPro »

23 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
Brilliant and Evocative Blend of Music and the Cinematographic Art, 19 March 2005

Author: dcovec from United States

Jarman to a T: Brilliant, atmospheric, imagistic, eccentric, and sometimes homo-erotic. An incredible blend of one of the great 20th century musical works on (or rather against) war and the cinematographic art.

I've seen this film twice now. Some of the comments given by other reviewers seem to miss the point of the film- it is dark and sometimes jarring. Jarman uses historic footage, color and colorization as a technique to refocus the viewer's eyes and thoughts. Jarman is not interested in narrative so much as building a series of images that take the poem and music to a new place of understanding.

Perhaps this film is not for everyone- but then I would love to tie every politician to his or her chair and force its viewing.

20 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Powerful, lyrical visual poem, 25 April 2002

Author: carlex from Hatfield, MA

War Requiem is a vital film in Derek Jarman's filmography; seemingly handcuffed by a score with which he could not play around at all, Jarman could not work his sonic wizardry with his usual collaborator Simon Fisher Turner, or any others. However, here Jarman fused many of his passions and obsessions into one of his most personal statements: working with favorite actors, especially the intense and beautiful Tilda Swinton; using the shimmering, glorious Super 8 of home and play; collaging and staging and digging up artifacts to reposition and reexamine them; and composing image and cuts like a composer working on a new symphony. Dziga Vertov and Dovzhenko may have been working in this vein this decades ago, but if Jarman gives it a try today, the comparisons are to "music video"; naturally, no one is really paying attention if they're making comments like this. The intent and effect of works such as War Requiem (or The Last of England and The Garden) are virtually an antithesis of the shallow, splashy, and seizure-ridden style and pace of MTV and company. Jarman has advanced his uniquely cinematic aesthetic - somewhere between the work of a symphonic composer and a painter, working with light and celluloid instead of oils - in this work that treads a tightrope between narrative and poetic verse. So many sequences of this film are powerful and gutsy and utterly moving: the montage of war footage, building in rhythm and intensity with Britten's score; the tear-inducing shot of Tilda swaying to the music; the nurses playing "Blind Man¹s Bluff"; the smoke and flowers. Derek crafted one of his most hearfelt, original, and spontaneously lyrical movies in War Requiem; now it only needs a top-notch release on DVD.

Intermittently effective screen counterpart to Britten's Mass setting, 14 November 2011
Author: Framescourer from London, UK

With the exception of an opening sequence in which the music is introduced over a tolling bell and the text of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting read, this film follows the scheme of Britten's War Requiem, a poetry-expanded musical setting of the Requiem Mass. It's an intermittently effective project, Jarman using both narrative scenes and more abstracted tableaux that rely on the actor in frame to channel some sort of internal narrative. There is also scattered use of period footage from conflicts both pre-1963 (the date of the oratorio's composition) and as recently as the Falklands conflict (1981). All this is, in turn, the extrapolated daydream of a veteran of the Great War, played by Lawrence Olivier.

Olivier's is the almost the only scene done on location and really does carry weight for all that it's mere seconds of screen time. Other scenes are rather more mixed: given the huge emotional and indeed satirical charge of the music the most affecting set pieces are those that play a straight narrative. That said, there is undeniable charge in the formal composition of static shots which reflect in their old master/biblical referencing the liturgy of the text. 5/10

1 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Tedious Onslaught of Insipid Imagery and Feckless Overacting, 5 April 2010

Author: Seragovitz from United Kingdom

Music has been blended with film to incredible effect before: Greenaway's Prospero's Books, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi spring to mind and I was naively expecting something of similar quality here. Instead I watched an appalling succession of tasteless, overwrought and prosaic imagery married with hysterical howls emanating from the bony profile of Tilda Swinton. Here the actors only served to detract from the music. The directors of the previous films were virtuosi and I think it requires something of that quality in editing, camera work and imagination: to actually add something to a piece of music rather than just take a ride on its tresses. As a backup plan I decided to concentrate more on the Requiem and found it peppered with sung passages of Wilfred Owen's poetry that do them no justice whatsoever.

11 out of 36 people found the following review useful:
Misguided music video, 26 January 1999
Author: David Arbury (darb@loc.gov) from Washington, DC

A misguided attempt at a music video for Benjamin Britten's piece of the same name, "War Requiem" falls flat because of this very concept. To their credit, the filmmakers add or subtract nothing to the performance of the Requiem but rather present a montage of images to be seen along with the performance (which thankfully is top-notch). Unfortunately, the end result is a long almost MTV quality production which makes one realize how unbearably pretentious the phenomenon of the music video can be.

War Requiem is a work which invites personal involvement, so I can appreciate the obvious love and need to contribute which the filmmakers have for it, but Britten's music and Wilfred Owen's poetry speak so eloquently for themselves that this pretentious performance art approach merely detracts from them.

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