The directorial debut of Stanley Kubrick, this film’s premise of a survival drama with soldiers having to escape from enemy territory is a somewhat interesting one, but the execution doesn’t work.
Kubrick hasn’t yet developed his knack for exploring the psychological deterioration of his characters in an interesting way, but his cold and clinical style remains. The result is a very simple story which nevertheless keeps insisting how serious and profound it thinks it is. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere near enough substance here to back that up.
What’s worse is that much of the editing, score, dialogue, and performances are actually quite silly, especially by modern standards. If it were less pretentious I feel like this could’ve been made into some pulpy nonsense, but as a serious war drama, it doesn’t work at all. Its themes would also go on to be explored numerous times in much more interesting films, including by Kubrick himself in Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket.
The nicest things I can say about it is that for being so cheaply produced, some of the cinematography looks decent enough. And the length of one hour is appropriate, a benefit of this being made at a time when our definition of feature length was a bit different.
As a side note, I wish there were more room for “featurettes” like this today. 30-60 minutes is the right length for some stories, but unless it’s a TV episode, people seem to have trouble with anything that length since it’s too long to be a short film and not long enough to fit our current definition of feature length.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1624we4/fear_and_desire_1952/
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