5 Days of War (2011)

Well, all kinds of things went wrong with this movie.

For starters, the opening sequence is awesome. One thing this movie really had was best camera crew ever. Everything feels very intense all the times, very close to the real war footage. Also, all the props, vehicles, uniforms, even explosions look very real. This is the good part.

The mediocre part is main story. It's a mix of Hotel Rwanda and Tears of the Sun, but feels like a bootleg version, a cheap knockoff of those.

And then there's the bad part. Just after awesome intro, you get "treated" with shots of Tbilisi, with landmarks, people smiling, and god forbid, trancey music in the background. It looked like a commercial for some travel agency, with only "Visit Georgia" message missing from the scene and was most tasteless thing I've ever seen in a film. I live in similar post-soviet country and I do understand the mentality in desperate desire to explain your culture to the world to get less looked as some remote hellhole, but this is outright tasteless and maybe Georgia hasn't come to this yet.

The script had generally no direction. Awesome war scene here, some corpses there, cameramen and photography director knew what to do... But director didn't. First, that simple shot with church and bloody river from 'Tears of the Sun' gives 10 times stronger emotion than whole pile of bodies shown in '5 days of August'. Even though latter tries sooo hard to portray Russians as savages.

Second, despite awesome camera and props, fighting had no point in this movie. You see soldiers shooting stuff and each other, but it's unclear why or what's their plan. I don't think any people who had any idea about how soldiers and military works were on the set. Mi-24 choppers shooting random buildings with rockets? And here I thought that every pilot is given orders and targets to waste expensive munitions on... Also, MI-24 sports a deadly cannon, but it's used only once, missing everything, and soldiers act as chopper had blind men for pilot and gunner, not taking cover. Tanks constantly missing targets and not using machine guns? Taking down a chopper with a single LAW rocket? SU-bombers taking down a restaurant residing in basically nowhere? This all felt very bizarre and pointless.

I could go on, but there's no need. Let's just say that this movie is very average, has some good moments, lots of unmemorable moments, and some outright stupid ones. So pick it up from bargain bin, but don't expect too much.

6 stars I give are for 2 reasons: Awesome camera work (it felt like live action at places) and the fact that despite being incredibly dumb, this movie IS entertaining... and that's good, even if it's for all wrong reasons.

...as for amount of propaganda, this movie is 100% okay, considering what comes from Moscow. Sure it's all bloated and overrated but this is how we rock in those former USSR satellite countries. Even 50 of such movies can't counter a single evening news show from random Russian TV-channel. For westerners, you just have to accept that rules are different, but watching all those Normandy landings in every Hollywood movie and video game, maybe not as much as you might think.

Fmovies: The open sequence is gut wrenchingly brilliant and raw, leaving you genuinely shocked. But as this scene fades into the next it appears the film changed director to one who watched to much A team and any 1960's World war II film.

For a film that purports to be a vision of real life events the director could not have got it more wrong. We are left with ridiculous battle scenes that are in fact an insult to the real horror of war on civilians. Hind gun ships firing bending missiles, the director loves this and we see these Hinds firing their bendy missiles all through out the film. Andy Garcia does his best Borat impression while the most shocking element of all is how much Val Kilmer has let himself go.

If you want to watch a brutal, raw and realistic film on the horrors of war, watch the first scene and then turn your TV off. If you want to watch some comic book propaganda film then keep on watching. A bad film that at the start hinted on how good it could have been!!

Directed by Renny Harlin and financed by the Georgian government, this drama is a Russian-bashing screed about the 2008 South Ossetia war and the events leading to it. The movie revolves around the experiences of two news reporters Thomas Anders (Rupert Friend) and Sebastian Ganz (Richard Coyle) who accept an assignment in Tbilisi, Georgia, a year after their previous assignment together in Iraq ended badly: the two men were rescued by a Georgian military unit in that country after their car was ambushed by militants. Anders and Ganz's noses for news (and trouble) get them fired upon while watching a wedding at a rural Georgian inn, avoiding capture while witnessing and filming atrocities by Russian troops who have invaded the country, and ending up as prisoners of a Russian general (Rade Serbedzija). While simultaneously escaping, yet being drawn to, trouble and danger, the reporters pick up a Georgian woman, Tatia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), a guest at the wedding at the inn. Through Tatia and a collective effort to broadcast Ganz's images to the rest of the world while keeping them away from the Russians, Anders finds a new purpose in life and a reason to go on living.

The romance between Anders and Tatia doesn't make sense: why should the two fall in love simply because chance threw them together and put them in danger together and individually? Any "chemistry" that might exist isn't present and the pair's kiss looks like an after-thought. More believable is Anders's loyalty to Ganz when Ganz is injured in a bomb attack and apparently dying: the two have been in many intense life-and-death situations which few other people can understand and sympathise with. Both men are devoted to seeking the truth behind layers of propagandistic fog though paradoxically this search can make them vulnerable to manipulation by politicians and the military. The plot's emphasis on safeguarding the memory stick that holds Ganz's images and the Russians' attempt to destroy it leaves no room for character development with the result that Anders, Ganz and their fellow journalists end up perpetuating old World War Two stereotypes about Russian soldiers torturing and killing people, raping women and torching farms and properties with flamethrowers. (Such stereotypes admittedly are based on fact: Soviet soldiers did act barbarically towards German civilians in the 1940s, partly as a result of the debased culture in the Soviet armed forces that arose after the purges of high-ranking military officers in the 1930s as ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a Georgian native - what irony.) As the movie carries on, hackneyed plot twists appear: Tatia's family is riven apart by internal betrayal, Ganz is threatened with torture by the Russian general's sadistic enforcer (Nikko Mousiainen), an attempt to broadcast Ganz's images fails when the reporters are targeted by a Russian helicopter, and Ganz is hurt in the helicopter attack. The enforcer kidnaps Tatia and forces Anders to choose between saving her life and keeping Ganz's film.

The film could have focused more closely on the dilemmas that journalists in war zones face: for one thing, whether the search for truth justifies putting their own lives and the lives of innocents in danger. There are various political and ethical decisions they have to make: how closely should they work with the government or the military? how would such work interfere with their journalist code of ethics? There is a female journalist featured who is embedde

5 Days of War fmovies. I could spend an hour writing a detailed play by play of the movie, but it's easier to say that yes... This is in fact a propaganda movie, so much so it uses the actual Georgian Army as "actors" for this film and using only Georgians as sources for the script.

But with that aside, can it be considered a good movie regardless of it's fictional re-writing of history? Sadly this is also no, it has direct to DVD written all over it, If it hadn't been filmed in Georgia, using Georgian soldiers giving it a authentic look it would have nothing standing this movie up.

I'll end this on a quote from Anna Neistat who works for "amnesty international" "This film portrays Russians and Ossetians as barbaric beasts and Georgians as peace angels." I couldn't sum it up any better Anna.

My hopes were high for this movie. The War between Georgia and South Ossetia/Russia in August of 2008 would seem to be a great background to a well-plotted, carefully crafted film that captures all the intrigue of the Caucasus. Since the Caucasus have always been a nest of ethnic divisions, political double-dealing and vicious banditry I would think any decent screenwriter and director could piece together a fairly intense thriller, I was so wrong. 5 Days of War is a twisted train wreck of special effects laden action and blatant propaganda with a parade of terrible acting. This film was disappointing on many levels. About 40 minutes into the film I realized I was watching a $20,000,000 piece of pro-Georgian anti-Russian propaganda. If anyone does a little research on this war they will clearly see that both sides committed illegal acts under international law. Georgia is actually blamed for triggering the war by using heavy artillery on a city unprovoked which killed civilians, Russian Peacekeepers and damaged large tracts of the city. Once the war began some Ossetia militias fighting with the Russians committed acts of ethnic cleansing and were not stopped by the Russian Military or Government. Shame on them and shame on Georgia for bombarding a city. I do not have a dog in this fight, I think that the problems of that part of the world should be answered by the countries and governments of that region. It is obvious that the filmmakers feel that we should clearly be supporting Georgia with their charismatic leader Mikheil Saakashvili played by Andy Garcia who is portrayed as a Georgian Thomas Jefferson or JFK. Why the hell did they use Andy Garcia anyway? This movie does nothing to help the outsider with the complexities of the actual situation. I want to know what the target audience was for the filmmakers. I was insulted by this film. Why would they take such a complex and historical subject and simplify it down to this? Westerners are natural allies of the peace-loving, compassionate Georgians therefore the obvious "Bad Guys" are the Russians and South Ossetians who bring murder, terror and misery upon the progressive Georgians. The world isn't so black and white and even us dimwitted moviegoers can appreciate the intricacies of politics in the Caucasus. The protagonist of this wreck is an unlikeable American journalist (Rupert Friend in a career ending role) who jumps head first into danger because of his troubled past. He is surrounded by a cadre of American/British journalists (Val Kilmer, Kenneth Cranham who are both wasted as ridiculous caricatures) who drink hard, take big risks and are always crying about how nobody cares about what is going on in the world. At all times they are protected and working directly on behalf of a group of saintly Georgian soldiers. They do not even pretend to be impartial and objective. The contrived role of Tatia (Emmanuelle Chriqui) is another low point in a film filled with an excruciating level of inaccuracies, clichés and thoughtless dialogue. Special effects are strong, location looks beautiful but the storyline and fact every major character is played by an American or British actor and not native Georgians/Russians is thoughtless and insulting (insulted again). ONLY WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS FILM IF YOU HAVE TIME TO WASTE AND REALLY WANT TO HAVE YOUR INTELLIGENCE QUESTIONED. A TRAVESTY.