I'm impressed this movie exists. This is entirely too ambitious to have any right to actually have become a finished product -much less a non-embarrassing, successful, critically well-received picture with a few star actors committing remarkably little screen time in the service of the film. I really wish I had been able to watch this in 1962 though, because you can just tell it was a much better movie then.
Now? Well, it's a little unfair, because Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and The Pacific also exist. (I'm sure I missed a few as World War II is not a war lacking in representation in television and movies). Specifically, the whole beach battle scene was distracting because - through absolutely no fault of The Longest Day - Saving Private Ryan just captures the horror much better. It's really not fair.
The Longest Day is a movie that, for every positive I can come up with, a negative comes right along with it. The scope is insane. It's both a strength and a weakness. I've never seen a movie mostly successfully include as many sides of a war as it did. It was surprisingly fair to the Germans too. Of course they came across looking the worst in this movie, but not near as much as you'd expect. This pretty much came at the expense of the characters though.
It relied too heavily on us knowing the actors portraying the characters and that's sort of an issue when that includes Fabian in the year 2015. He's an admittedly minor character, but in what I think was his death - I don't know if it was - the movie treats it like it's a big deal and I had no idea who the fuck he was. That's essentially my problem with the movie. It's an hour and a half of war action scenes involving characters I am not remotely invested in which means I have to completely get drawn into the spectacle itself. That honestly probably would have been enough to get me to love the movie in 1962, but the technology has improved so vastly since then, it doesn't stand a chance of gripping me for an hour and half now.
Also, it's a smart idea to include comedy in your blockbuster war movies so that you aren't depressed the whole time. Problem: any time the movie attempts comedy, it's awful. I'm pretty sure they were going for a fair amount of comedic scenes and there may have been one or two scenes where I didn't laugh, but thought it was amusing. Maybe. I hate to keep harping on how much better certain things are in 2015, but comedy is certainly one of them.
There were a few scenes that were so spectacular that I was amazed. There is a scene where the German pilots - the two stranded ones who need to go alone against the entire opposing force - fly across the beach and it's one take. The camera goes along the beach, the machine gun fires, and you see the people fall as they should. And it keeps going and it must have been ridiculously hard to time and they pulled it off beautifully. The scene where a man lays stuck in his parachute hanging from the church building and he watches all his comrades get slaughtered was tragic. The scene where the nuns come and kick ass and just walk through battle to start healing the soldiers. These are scenes that will come with no such negative attached to them.
Also I will note that the cast is incredible. I do not however understand why John Wayne was cast. He's not bad. But you can't watch his scenes and think he's anything but John Wayne and that's super distracting when the movie is mostly going for authenticity. Robert Mitchum fares better, although I was not a huge fan of him just walking around the beach without a gun like he's fucking Superman. Henry Fonda really should not work, but he's playing a revered, mythical-like person in Teddy Roosevelt Jr. so you can get away with casting an actor with his ubiquity and star power and not get taken out of a scene. Plus, Fonda plays the everyman in his movies. John Wayne plays John Wayne. Sean Connery shows up too. He's energetic and barely in it.
A problem created by the ambition of the project is there's too many characters. It's not even necessarily the number of characters, but characters who seem important turn out to not be that important and other characters who seem important get ignored with an hour left in the movie never to return. The French resistance? Was that really worth showing? They blew up a train, presumably one that prevented reinforcements, but I wasn't ever sure what the train was for or how much it ended up helping. And I believe that's their last scene out of like three total scenes. I don't think Fonda's character got an ending. He found out they missed their landing and then directed the soldiers were to go and I don't believe he got another scene. It definitely didn't capture just how vital Roosevelt Jr.'s actions were to winning.
- This is a three hour movie so I have a lot of thoughts apparently. I really liked the introduction scene where they kept cutting to different characters with snappy music and their title popping up on the screen. Kind of wish they somehow maintained that tone.
- Possibly unfair complaint, but I don't remember a movie where deaths seemed to matter less than in this one. I don't know how to explain that, but at the least this movie doesn't come close to giving death the proper weight it deserves. (This is fairly typical in movies that glorify war admittedly and this movie certainly glorifies war)
- The acting in this is... inconsistent. I said it has a strong cast and it does, but some of the time I was impressed by the acting and some of the time it was off-putting when the actor went into over-the top 40s war soldier mode. (I like Richard Beymer a lot in Twin Peaks, but not so much in this movie until the last scene)
- The movie also had a tendency to explicitly express something that was already obvious by the way it was filmed. And I didn't like the scenes where the characters seem to know way too much about the future - "People will laugh at us because we will lose the war because Hitler was sleeping" - I mean come on...
- For all my complaints this is wonderfully directed. Action was clear, it was not boring for the most part despite its length, and a few shots were magnificent.
3/4 stars
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