It doesn’t help that the youngsters who have this essential but unenviable task are difficult to distinguish from each other. “…the entire globe is still littered with mines even though the conflicts that led to their use have ended decades ago.” While it’s easy to see why the lads burst into tears often, 100 minutes of it can get redundant quickly. Nonetheless, Zandvliet has trouble getting the story to move. The stakes in Land of Mine are certainly high, and the situation is urgent. If one of the boys doesn’t deactivate the mine quickly enough or works on one with fragile components, it detonates just as easily as if they had stepped on it. Most of these lads simply want to go home to their moms.Įven the training for de-mining is lethal.
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Rasmussen’s watch have barely hit puberty and have little idea how to undo the damage their predecessors have done. If the quantity of the weapons weren’t intimidating enough, the fellows who have the task of removing them are ill-suited for it.īy the end of the war, Hitler sent teens and sometimes mere boys to fight because the trained soldiers had almost all died on the front. Rasmussen supervises the remaining German soldiers who are in Denmark to remove all the mines their army had left behind. “If Germans had not only invaded your country but also buried countless mines along the beaches, you’d be violently angry as well.” If Germans had not only invaded your country but also buried countless mines along the beaches, you’d be violently angry as well. Carl Rasmussen (Roland Møller) verbally and physically abuses German soldiers as their wearily retreat.
While writer-director Martin Zandvliet has the decency not to end the film with the now obligatory footage of real participants during the closing credits, it might have been more worthwhile to simply let a filmmaker like Ken Burns recount the facts, which in this case are more intriguing than fiction.Īs World War II ends in Europe, the irate Dane Sgt. A strong good performance from Møller.Despite having an inherently fascinating subject, Land of Mine, Denmark’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, plays more like a dry history lesson instead of a movie.
Is this fair? Who knows? After a while, the mine clearance, like the building of the bridge on the River Kwai, reveals new relationships. The Danish officers above Rasmussen are, like him, motivated by icy resolution and retributive cruelty, but it is the British officers (whose idea it was) who are depicted as pure sadists. Roland Møller plays Rasmussen, a grizzled and brutal Danish army sergeant who oversees a work-party of teenage German conscripts, utterly contemptuous of them at first.
This terrifying and suicidally dangerous job was technically proscribed for captured enemy combatants under the Geneva conventions but the Danish authorities thought it was what the Germans deserved. After the Nazi surrender in 1945, thousands of German PoWs were forced to clear the Danish coastline of the mines that Hitler had ordered be placed there, made to crawl through the sand, gently easing thin metal wands into it to find the evil devices. A tough, well-made war movie – sometimes shockingly violent – about a little known and very grim moment at the end of the second world war.