Post by UbiquitousNothing.
What did you watch?
Hey, thanks for asking!
WHERE EAGLES DARE.
As seen in rhinos other thread
I don’t think I had ever seen a frame of this movie. Richard Burton and
Clint Eastwood star as commandos tasked with rescuing a captured general,
who knows about invasion plans from a snowbound castle in World War II.
NOTHING BUT SPOILERS AHEAD
This is one overly long, huge, sprawling mess of a movie
Nothing and no one is what they seem and several change identity several
times. In fact, they have two big scenes where Richard Burton explains the
plot to everyone in the movie and the audience, and I still never figured
out what their mission was.
Characters disappear and reappear without warning. I swear there’s a female
paratrooper in the opening sequence, but we never see her again. And at the
ending sequence were they’re flying away a female character they left
behind in the castle is there in the plane with them.
It’s full of the standard silly stuff like when they push a non-running car
off a hill the passenger compartment explodes halfway down. In fact, almost
everything explodes in this movie. I was actually disappointed when a car
went off the embankment and into the river and didn’t explode.
The seven commandos that parachute in for the rescue mission have somehow
managed to carry an unlimited number of cute bombs. They look like a dozen
sticks of dynamite, strapped together with a timer on it and a pull out
cord. They can be set to go off by the timer or the cord can be pulled off
so they go off when you trip over them, but you can also combine it so
tripping over it will start a delayed timer. However, they also have the
unexplained and inexplicable ability to trigger other bombs all over the
place.
For instance, they set a trip wire bomb in a storage shack and go out the
windows so when the Nazis come in one of them trips over it and blows up
the shack. But this also causes a parked jeep nearby to explode, a moving
car full of people to explode, and even a machine gun nest case some
distance away to explode all simultaneously.
The entire plot seems to be an incredibly complex plan to reveal all the
secret Nazis in the British command, but they already knew who they were or
they wouldn’t be able to assign them to this mission!
Of the seven commandos three are Nazi agents and they let them prove who
they are by letting them kill two of the commandos who aren’t Nazi agents.
Then for some reason, they try to capture and take the three agents back to
England, but they could’ve avoided the entire movie by just arresting them
there in the first place. And they end up killing them all anyway.
The big ending scene is the reveal we’d already guessed where they catch
the top Nazi agent in all of Britain and then let him throw himself out of
the airplane rather than taking him back to England for questioning.
The process shots, mostly Burton in front of snow back drops, are
technically flawless, but look like ass.
There’s quite a bit of action on a cable car used to access the castle, but
it’s frankly silly. I don’t think you blow one cable car to smithereens
without causing the cable to at least bounce the other car… and the
physical feats with them climbing out the windows and up to the top of the
car and back down and in and out repeatedly are at the very least unlikely.
Clint fires an enormous number of rounds, but at least he reloads
constantly. Like the unlimited number of bombs they brought they brought an
unlimited number of magazines for their weapons.
As they make the big final escape, the silly Germans have all their fighter
planes lined up in a neat row, so Burton drives their bus with a snowplow
nose straight at them and hits all the tails causing the planes to all blow
up, of course.
It held my attention for 2 1/2 hours so thank you Rhino!
Post by Ubiquitous--
Let's go Brandon!
--
The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it is still on my list.