The most striking thing for me about this movie is that it deals with a trial about the killing of unarmed people (murder by some standards?) without ever really discussing the moral justification for the killing. It seems that it might be right in one scenario but not in another. Depending on whether (or not) you got the nod and the wink from your commanding officer. And not on whether you actually judged it to be morally right or not yourself. A dangerously flexible morality, perhaps? Or, is it just the way we fight wars these days? Or. Perhaps it's the way we've always fought them but have only just discovered about the nod and the wink.
I did just two months of active service in the Rhodesian bush in the early seventies. Each camp had a period of re-training and during that time we got the nod and the wink from our commanding officer. Beat them about a bit, make them understand that we're tougher than the other side. This in reference to unarmed black civilians. If an unfortunate accident should occur. A slip of the trigger finger. Well. Don't worry, no-one's going to do anything about it. It's all for a good cause. The war cause. Almost anything's OK for the war cause. That war, incidentally, was lost. So was Vietnam.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth. However that is a manifest lie in itself. The first and last casualties of war are civilians, and in that category I would lump prisoners of war. If they aren't being deliberately bombed, as in Dresden, London or Nagasaki, they are accused of every kind of deception and put up against walls and shot, or displaced in their thousands or millions towards destinations who don't want them, or herded into unsanitary camps to face malnutrition and disease.
Yes, of course the acting and photography are good. However there seemed to be some playing for audience sympathy for the three soldiers on trial, while the Boers were depicted as a ragtag bunch of scarecrows instead of the highly resourceful and religiously devout people that they actually were. After all they were pioneers in a savage land.
The only injustice, in my view, was the injustice to the unarmed men (Boers and priest) who were callously shot. The rest is procedural - there should have been more men on trial, especially amongst the nodders and winkers. More rule 303.
I did just two months of active service in the Rhodesian bush in the early seventies. Each camp had a period of re-training and during that time we got the nod and the wink from our commanding officer. Beat them about a bit, make them understand that we're tougher than the other side. This in reference to unarmed black civilians. If an unfortunate accident should occur. A slip of the trigger finger. Well. Don't worry, no-one's going to do anything about it. It's all for a good cause. The war cause. Almost anything's OK for the war cause. That war, incidentally, was lost. So was Vietnam.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth. However that is a manifest lie in itself. The first and last casualties of war are civilians, and in that category I would lump prisoners of war. If they aren't being deliberately bombed, as in Dresden, London or Nagasaki, they are accused of every kind of deception and put up against walls and shot, or displaced in their thousands or millions towards destinations who don't want them, or herded into unsanitary camps to face malnutrition and disease.
Yes, of course the acting and photography are good. However there seemed to be some playing for audience sympathy for the three soldiers on trial, while the Boers were depicted as a ragtag bunch of scarecrows instead of the highly resourceful and religiously devout people that they actually were. After all they were pioneers in a savage land.
The only injustice, in my view, was the injustice to the unarmed men (Boers and priest) who were callously shot. The rest is procedural - there should have been more men on trial, especially amongst the nodders and winkers. More rule 303.