36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Far Too Realistic Look At War To Stay In Print, March 1, 2006
This review is from: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century [VHS] (VHS Tape)
I have never seen a more courageous portrayal of human-kind's tendency to hate and destroy in titanic, catastrophic proportion. It is an easy and expected thing for war documentaries to show and describe the physical horrors of war in the fake attempt to bare its darkest aspects; but, we have become immune to violence and frankly most of us enjoy it. The bloodier the battle, the higher the body-count the more entertaining the story. So the experience becomes just that - a story, an abstraction where the lives portrayed have no connection to the viewer. "The Great War" doesn't hide the shocking facts of war. The death toll and the acts of depravity are depicted in great detail, but where this film stands apart is in its near complete failure to portray war as a necessary evil where boys become men, where heroes are made, where evil is conquered, where it all turns out all-right in the end. No, I believe this film is out of print because it is a danger to those who need wars to be started and fought with ignorant enthusiasm and for the terrible aftermath to be viewed in a delusional fog. The good people at PBS need to honor the bravery it took to make this film by re-releasing it on DVD.
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Documentary I've ever seen, December 26, 2000
This review is from: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century [VHS] (VHS Tape)
I watch perhaps more documentaries than is healthy, but I do tend to learn a lot. In my many years of watching I've never found a documentary as well done as this. It's entertaining and disturbing at the same time. The use of photographs and voices in this production are put together quite well and by far surpass any other production I've ever seen. I would definately recommend this to even new students of the war, although this is done well enough to impress even historians who have spent many years in study.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best social histories ever filmed, August 9, 2000
This review is from: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century [VHS] (VHS Tape)
This is perhaps the only filmed attempt to weave social history into the fabric of World War I. For that alone, the series deserves much praise. Most documentaries of war give explicit detail as to troop movements and tactics, but leave the social backdrop very much out of focus. Here the intent is not to be a definitive resource on the war's progress, but to give a sense of what the war was like to endure, what effect it had on the shape of the rest of the century, and why it started.
I found it intriguing to think of Kaiser Wilhelm as an actual person, bedeviled by childhood ailments and childhood rivalries, rather than the simplistic jingoistic icon he would become. Likewise, it was interesting to have all the major European social movements at home brought into the exposition of what was going on at the front. I never knew that the whole of France, workers and soldiers alike, went on strike in the middle of the war-and somehow managed to keep the fact from the French. Likewise, I was fascinated by the attempts of a lone French legislator to keep war from starting through the use of a particularly theatrical speech in a church, and how his ultimate murder dashed all hopes of civility.
While it may be true that this series won't offer much in the way of battlefield detail-the producers wisely realized that there were already documentaries about that-it does much to recreate the feel of the era. You come to appreciate what it was like to be alive then, both on the battlefield and at home. It is in short a textural experience that will leave any viewer affected by the horror of that war, and the price the world had to pay to enter the 20th century.
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