Word: gallipolis
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...folk tale complete with Robert DeNiro as an MIG-toting ubermensch. And in Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola made war something mythic; something so big and so surreal that one wondered who was playing The Ride of the Valkyries after all. But in Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli, there is something of a retrenchment, at least intellectually. In the movie, war does not get treated so much as it simply occurs. Instead of a homily or an exegesis, Weir delivers a story...
Unlike Apocalypse Now or The Deerhunter, war in Gallipoli does not resemble an all-consuming vortex. Instead, war, specifically Winston Churchill's ill-fated Gallipoli campaign into Ottoman Turkey, waits patiently at the end of the film. For Gallipoli concerns getting to the front and the adventures en route as much as the conflict on the 60-mile-long Turkish peninsula...
...magnificent cinematography of Russell Boyd. One after another, rich sequences of film fill the screen. Shots of furtive faces seen through the wheels of a passing train, or of a shimmering Australian desert, or of boatloads of soldiers making an amphibious assault through an eerie bluish fog make Gallipoli the kind of movie that you would not want to leave even if the sound track broke...
...dirge-like Adagio in G minor to signify CRITICAL MOMENTS and IMPENDING FATE. The fault lies not in the adagio, which is a fine piece of music, but its repeated use as a cue is silly and melodramatic. Yet, it is by no means a fatal flaw. To ruin Gallipoli would take something more along the order of Waltzing Mathilda for 110 minutes...
...economy, the resonances in ordinary-seeming events. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the scale of this project, for one senses throughout that he is pulling back to the safely particular rather than straining forward toward a more daring grandeur. Well acted and, within its limited terms, well made, Gallipoli represents a failure of nerve as well as design. -By Richard Schickel