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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty Good, February 13, 2001
This review is from: Vukovar [VHS] (VHS Tape)
It has been a decade since the November 1991 fall of Vukovar. It is good to remember that this was the first atrocity in the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, coming long before the shelling of Dubrovnik, the rape camps of Prijedor, the seige of Sarajevo, and the massacre at Srebrenica. The ferocity of the violence levelled against civilians in Vukovar established a pattern that was to be repeated too often over the next four years and led to at least four indictments by the UN war crimes tribunal. This film is not without flaws, but it is pretty good nonetheless. We see street fighting, and we know that the protagonist is a soldier in the Yugoslav Army, but the broader political question of why the Yugoslav army is utterly destroying a city it claims is within Yugoslavia is left unexplained. Viewers fluent in Serbo-Croatian or familiar with the political landscape of Yugoslavia will immediately understand that the boy is a Serb and the girl a Croat, and the unfolding of the rest of the plot will be a simple formulaic exercise. However, for newcomers, some introductory text would have been useful to clarify who is who. The love story itself is fairly predictable and the cast is competent. But the real star of the film is Vukovar itself. Once a lively river town of mixed ethnicity now reduced to rubble by a few months of intensive artillery shelling and ultimately street-to-street fighting. The scenes are unforgettable, the citizens huddled in basements scarcely believing how their lives descended into chaos in such a short time, tanks plowing down city streets firing artillery into attractive houses, bodies floating down the Danube, insane women stirring their cauldrons like Macbeth's witches, and the inevitable "dogs of war" thriving on the lawlessness accompanying the misery. Watching the destruction of a city is a wrenching experience, but perhaps an important lesson. We shouldn't forget Vukovar.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A once happy union...., January 25, 2003
This review is from: Vukovar [VHS] (VHS Tape)
What this film does very effectively is show how imaginary boundaries (in this case ethnic boundaries) are constructed very quickly by even the most civilized populations once fear grips a city and how those imaginary boundaries take on a reality even in the minds of those who never had such prejudices before during times of war. Boundaries which are difficult to dismantle once the war is over as so much violence has been done under the banners flown by each side. The propaganda may seem ridiculous to thinking people, the idea of ethnic purity utterly absurd, but the violence has an undeniable reality. The phenomena that makes people surrender their individuality to a mass movement is perhaps incomprehensible and unexplainable. All a film can do is show how particular individuals deal with such a circumstance. What is interesting about this film is that there are no extremists in it. Every character in this film is a victim whether he be a Serb or a Croat. The only people that benefit from the war are thieves. The main characters are a couple who are married on the day Ethnic Nationalism begin to flair up. One of them is a Serb and one a Croat. As the war escalates those imaginary boundaries which divide the country will divide this couple as well. Perhaps permanently. Because even though neither believes in the ethnic propaganda they both experience too much violence between their respective races to ever see each other in the same light again. Such is the tragedy of this couple and the tragedy of Yugoslavia.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Airman / Student's View of "Vukovar", August 14, 2000
This review is from: Vukovar [VHS] (VHS Tape)
When I first saw the film "Vukovar" I was a Serbian / Croatian language student at the Defense Language Institute. I saw it over a year ago and the film still sticks with me. This film proves that war is hell. It proves that the situation in the war zone is a world away from the situation reported by CNN. This film made me deeply contemplate the nature of the profession of arms and ask some very important introspective questions. On a lighter side this film also proves that the Balkan peoples are some of the world's best film-makers and the beauty of the Serbian / Croatian language.
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