Reviews of The Unknown Soldier (1955) and related work
- Same source material: The Unknown Soldier (2017)
The Unknown Soldier (1955
)
Seen in 2017.
The Continuation War (1941–1944).
A war movie by and for the generation that fought the war, but a transparently hasty, cinematographically dull adaptation of the 1954 novel, which I haven’t read. The script is too literary, with soldiers often speaking quite trivially, at excessive length in static shots. Rather than capturing the “hurry up and wait” aspect of the draftee’s life, this just makes the movie run rather longer than it should. There is no literary ambition along the lines of The Naked and the Dead (1948).
References here: The Winter War (1989).
‣ The Unknown Soldier (2017)
Seen in 2025.
I saw the three-hour version, not the two-hour version.
It looks like director Aku Louhimies tried to bring Terrence Malick’s cinematography into the narrowest corners of this, the third film based on the novel. It is otherwise a typical effort for its time, marred by particulate-heavy explosions and implausible little clouds of blood that were all added in postproduction. Everybody gets shot, except the poorly characterized hot women. There is no unknown soldier, and I get the sense that Louhimies was trying to alternate between protagonists rather than build an ensemble drama. Eero Aho does the best acting as anti-authoritarian supersoldier Antti Rokka, the only man who survives being shot, and the only one who knows the standard way to clear a trench.
Despite the Malick influence, the battle scenes are many and monotonous, sometimes poorly planned or poorly edited, so that you need to see the multiple red CGI puffs on a man to know what’s going on. Despite strong efforts at nuance, there is very little talk about how the Continuation War happened with active German support. I would think that the various anarchist and communist sympathizers in the focal platoon would be a little more interested in their fascist allies, unseen except for Hitler on a newsreel and some German equipment. Instead, for three hours, they are caught between their Finnish chain of command and their Russian enemy, with little happening on the symbolic level.