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Battle of Long Tan movie to begin filming


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Former commando to film Battle of Long Tan movie in Queensland

An A-list cast, including Travis Fimmel, will feature in a major new movie to be filmed in Queensland thanks to the support of the Palaszczuk Government 

Speaking from Los Angeles, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the film, to be produced by award-winning Australian Martin Walsh, was about the Battle of Long Tan will be filmed in Queensland this year.  

Pre-production will start in March and shooting from the end of April.

Set in Vietnam and starring an A-list cast, the provisionally-titled Danger Close is based on the true story of young men facing the strange, contradictory and brutal truths of war.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the Queensland Government was proud to support the production, which would begin filming around Anzac Day in this Armistice Centenary year.

 

More here: http://statements.qld.gov.au/Statement/2018/2/28/former-commando-to-film-battle-of-long-tan-movie-in-queensland

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looks like it could have been directed by michael bay. compare the trailer with almost any action movie, and many of the same techniques are there. dialogue is too movie like and looks as if actors are delivering lines out of hamlet. when war flicks use those film scores it it's really quite off putting in my view. the only thing missing is the female choir voice which cuts in "whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" for all of spr's cliched characters and plotlines, the actual combat sequences lacked a lot of that high form theatre stuff. i watched clips of dunkirk and i thought it was the same sort of thing

 

compare with any trailer, most modern films are basically so flimsy that they resemble one another across genres

 

 

 

 

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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right, of course that is true. but i am making a bet that it will be like most war films that is, about 90 percent of them. most films are made the same way, they follow predictable patterns regardless of the story, for instance, the last stand battle scene is nigh100 percent guaranteed to send off the climax in any war film. likewise the human wave attacks through explosions are also indispensable. then there are the other things which might be more subtle, but when you see all this repeated upteen times, it's hard to unsee it. i see just the glue, that is, the film techniques themselves distracting me from any over arching presentation.

there a documentary series on the vietnam war i watched a few years ago, if i could find it again on youtube i would post a link to it for the intro scenes alone- which i think filmmakers should attempt to achieve based on the editing and just the raw grit

 

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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Well, if you strive for historical accuracy and if there are parallels in VietCong vs US or ANZAC tactics (both "We Were Soldiers" and this one happened during the same period), there's going to be some parallels. So if you're "innovative" (such as in Dunkirk) you get berated by the rivet counters. If you stick to the events, you're "lacking innovation". Not sure how any director could win this, short of not directing any war movie at all. Pretty much any director tries to convey the tragedy of warfighting while at the same time struggling with a very limited time budget. So you get the tropes of the expecting father, clutching photographs of the kids he never met. If there's a young guy in a scene before the battle who tells everybody about his family, you just know he's going to die later. Yes, it's formulaic, but does that make it any less poignant? Does the tragedy really become stale, just because it's history repeating?

Likewise, the vocalise choir was a novelty with Blackhawk Down; it's become a cliché because it's effective. Technically you could consider it the modern day equivalent of the choir in Greek tragedy, so the instrument has been around for at least two and a half millenia (probably longer, but there's little surviving historical evidence).

Almost every war movie culminates in a big battle and then spends another ten minutes with the aftermath. How could it be different, given the requirement to tell a coherent story in a film? Pretty much every historian writing about a battle, even if it's a thoroughly scholarly piece, tells a story. There's "a beginning" which is chosen more or less arbitrarily, the closer you look at it. There's "a place" where the battle happens, there's the opening, the culmination, the end, the aftermath. There are selected acting persons, usually the generals, or, a trend of the last 50 years, "somebody" who just happens to have left behind useful sources like a diary, letters, or an interview; Those who happened to be in the thick of it often don't survive to tell their story.

 

I have to admit though that the majority of war films actually aren't very good; the track record is only worse for car racing films (the vast majority is utter rubbish). This is partly due to the very nature of the subject. The greater the quantitative tragedy the less it's suitable to be told in a coherent film that keeps the audience oriented, and engaged. Case in point, the Waterloo movie is a classic, and actually relatively high up there, but the most useful scenes to keep the audience oriented - helicopter shots of the futile French cavalry charge - are also the least engaging, just like (another cliché) the general and his staff brooding over the map, with lots of burning tobacco in the air. At the same time these scenes are necessary to show what the leaders believed they were up to, what their intent was. The closer you get to the gut stabbing, the more involved the audience is, but by necessity you lose focus of the overall situation. War movies are a formidable challenge to any director, and rarely you get something that works well as a film on its own, and which is also historically accurate and keeps the audience oriented about the significance of the battle, where and why it happened, and the sequence and topographical location os important events.

 

No matter what you do as a director, you almost always get mixed reactions from the audience.

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1 hour ago, Captain_Colossus said:

... likewise the human wave attacks through explosions are also indispensable.

 

 

Well given that's how the battle unfolded with the RNZA and US guns keeping the NVA away from the Australians through mulitple missions near / on D Coy's position it sort of figures.

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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but you've seen this before- it tends to be formulaic, what you have are these effectively star trek red shirts for the sake of showing anonymous characters die. you'll have explosions going off two feet away from someone who runs through them, someone else the same distance away thrown in the air or whatever. i didn't watch the whole dunkirk film, only clips of the stukas dive bombing the troops trapped on the ground or in ships, and the effect of the bombs were about the same as hand grenades on bunched up targets. what's odd however in these movies however is the undramatic effect explosions going on right next to human body, but lines of dialogue delivered will have these close ups of emotional reactions on people or cause them to hunker down so that you can see the camera zoom in on their faces. it's a bit uneven. artillery doesn't have quite the suppressive effects as certain moments where the actors or posed just so that or in order that you get to see a freeze frame of a human face in some contorted expression or something.  if you remember the scenes in fury where the camera would fix on the gunner's face with open mouth and frozen looking into the eyepiece, these techniques are too contrived and too easily remembered from film to film. there is too much pretense where things are posed, which of course by definition you can't avoid in a film or a play. but i reiterate there was something more natural about spr's combat sequences.

 

remember that fury got people's attention based on the trailer, but if you understand how films are made, then you know the chances are they all look like something you've seen before. why this should this be different? because i the elements are australian, which unusual for films? that's unlikely.

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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 the fact that i am discussing this is not initself 'trolling'. i am sorry but i don't go in for passive aggressiveness nor tolling. i am stating my direct views on this trailer, and if you don't share them, fine, but it doesn't mean i'm trolling or fishing for something.

 

the problem with film directors are common techniques which i think ought to be generally discredited, and if they were, they could produce better films. one of the worst techniques are use of cameras panning across battlefields from a birdseye or godseye perspective. this gives the audience a detached, impersonal view of the battle. so in the actual battle, the  blue team doesn't have a panning camera sweeping across the battlefield watching watching enemy soldiers running through explosions, artillery, and what have you. they see it from their perspective, and often not seeing the enemy directly at all.  this is what spr did well- spielberg used hand held cameras with gave the audience a pov view during the opening scene, giving the film a more documentary look rather than 'look how much stuff we can cram in a single take'. it's the same sort of techniques for ogre armies and fantasy battles in lord of the rings or something and the effect is in my view diminishing what a war film should be like to separate it from that sort of vision.

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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5 hours ago, Captain_Colossus said:

one of the worst techniques are use of cameras panning across battlefields from a birdseye or godseye perspective.

In your opinion. It's the most time-effective method to give the audience an overview, the equivalent of having an illustrating map in a historian's work about a battle. It is also problematic, for the reasons you give and which I mentioned before already, but movies are primarily restricted by their duration. The time budget is the biggest constraint of any director's options to tell a story. It is not a surprise that many go for this technique as a shortcut to get the audience oriented.

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it is over used and as such i think it has diminishing returns (in my opinion of course- that is the only opinion that i can offer- unless i quote someone else's opinion on it). audiences will subconsciously pick up on it, since they have seen it so many times

before. your brain will have that somewhere locked up in memory and stored away. it's like going through the motions, sitting through a viewing and seeing the same film techniques and meh. to be clear, these things are always evolving. there used to be times when you watch older films directors used wipes to transition scenes from one to the other- if you've ever seen a star wipe before or the circle that would open up and expand to introduce us to the next scene or close the current one, these are 'discredited' film techinques that no one uses anymore. they had their purpose, but filmmakers realize at some point these were clumsy techniques. they were efficient at what they did however at transitioning from scene to scene, but they are done with that now.

 

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11 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Then you shouldn't attempt discussing it.

honestly went over my head. what shouldn't i be discussing? i am making similar comparisons to another war film, and i am prefacing it with the fact i didn't see the whole thing. i am pointing out how the modern war film is about as fornulaic

as the films from the 40s and 50s, different but formula in their own way. i think it's time they take a different approach now, but i can tell that they are taking the same kinds of shortcuts and manipulative strategies. this trailer with the anachronistic music score (why not pick music from that era or none at all?), the cuts, the way the actors are delivering their lines looks like a trailer for a transformers movie or for any modern action thriller rather than a war film. it could be that the meat of the film is different from the trailer, however, i'm going to bet that is probably not the case. filmmakers play it very safe these days and it is what it is.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Captain_Colossus said:

honestly went over my head. what shouldn't i be discussing? i am making similar comparisons to another war film, and i am prefacing it with the fact i didn't see the whole thing. i am pointing out how the modern war film is about as fornulaic

as the films from the 40s and 50s, different but formula in their own way. i think it's time they take a different approach now, but i can tell that they are taking the same kinds of shortcuts and manipulative strategies. this trailer with the anachronistic music score (why not pick music from that era or none at all?), the cuts, the way the actors are delivering their lines looks like a trailer for a transformers movie or for any modern action thriller rather than a war film. it could be that the meat of the film is different from the trailer, however, i'm going to bet that is probably not the case. filmmakers play it very safe these days and it is what it is.

 

 

If you have not seen a film, any argument is moot. You will be talking like a blind man about colours.

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