So, I said I'd make it, and I am, and to get this ball rolling I present to you a scene from the worst war movie ever made. This one you can't actually blame on Hollywood, as it was made in Canada. "But Sheepherder," you say; "it's sort of like a low budget Saving Private Ryan set in World War I, it actually isn't that ba... oh... kay..." The gauntlet has been thrown down, BrokenForum.
Look on the bright side: it could be worse, I could have started the thread with the sex scene. Yes, you read correctly. Apparently something about the gas projectors, the exploding French countryside, and the ruggedly dirty Canadian soldiers gets the nurses all hot and bothered. I wish I were exaggerating in the slightest.
Man fuck Canadian WW1 media. I was forced in high school to read a book that included a scene where a male soldier is gang raped in a public bath house, and where an old woman recounts her experience of walking in on that same soldier having angry doggy style sex with her older sister. I then had to do an oral report on said book. Fuck whoever wrote that book.
That is almost certainly the film's anachronistic and fictional take on the crucified soldier story, which is very well known Canadian/British military history whether or not it actually happened. WWI Canadian military is actually quite interesting. It was disproportionately "glorious," whatever that means in the wider context of the Western Front's tragic futility, with the positives and negatives that came from "martial glory" in terms of a country's military history and memory. It was also rather brutal, as the Canadians and Germans fell into a cycle of take-no-prisoners warfare, a subject that's been little discussed outside of academic military history.
I generally don't put much belief in that story. We're either expected to believe that a bunch of dudes watched one of their own get crucified while holding rifles accurate to half a kilometer, or that they stumbled upon the remains afterwards but the body was never recovered. That being said, even if you accept the fiction of the movie, you have to question why they decide to show the enemy respect immediately after crucifying one of them. As an added bonus, if I remember correctly the kid is supposed to survive being staked out for hours in the open in no man's land. I might be mistaken though, because:
My interpretation of the scene was that the artillery, purely by coincidence, flung him up there and onto the cross thing.
The movie shows it - as Elyscape points out - as a grotesque accident but at any rate the movie takes place 2 years after the historical incident and/or rumour, and is pretty clearly a fictionalized guess or quasi-historical reference rather than an historical portrayal. The rumour was, iirc, not crazily far fetched so much as it was poorly attested (especially in comparison to its status as a big wartime atrocity legend). In the interwar period there was a reaction against "German atrocity stories," in part because of concerted efforts by the Germans and in part because some of them were of course false. On the other hand, a good number of "Germans committing atrocities in Belgium" ones from 1914 were accurate, though, however much they were elaborated and fictionalized by lurid propaganda. The Germans Army had a rather hair-trigger phobia of and draconian approach towards any hint of guerilla warfare, and the advance through Belgium saw significant war crimes take place. There's a wikipedia article with various NPOV-fights, but I don't think there's much dispute about the whole "huge reprisal shootings for anything that looks like guerilla activity" pattern.
I actually browsed through the IMDB page when I was initially pointed in it's direction. I have a feeling it would end with me throwing the TV at my popcorn, for things like this:
Oh, hey, I've got this on Blu-ray! Still haven't watched it... I wish there were more good World War I films.
Though it doesn't quite meet the, uh, lofty standards set by Sheepherder's film (it is a WWI film though!), BBC's production of BIRDSONG is quite possibly the most miserable and sadistic adaptation of a novel ever made. It is, without exaggerating, three hours of an entire film crew and cast trying their damndest to make Eddie Redmayne frown as long and as hard as possible. This is quite the horrific thing to do considering he is still frowning from BLACK DEATH - let's cut the kid a break, shall we? No, we shan't. I'm not really sure what is more brutal: the melodrama or the war. Both are equally boring, but in the former he breaks up a family and basically drives a woman to kill herself (iirc) and then he rejects her sister (who is now maimed, again, iirc) who has always loved him even after telling him he had a kid with the other woman that he never knew about PLEASE STAY FOREVER (wtf) and then he leaves and in the latter he gets every single person he cares about killed because he's too busy being butthurt over girls for anyone to do their job properly. He literally gets his best friends killed when they come up with a "bomb the German hq from the tunnels below!" plan to cheer him up and instead of saying "fuck this let's get wasted" he's like "SUICIDE IS PAINLESS" and Tom Sizemore looks really sad. I think BBC trolled PBS.
