Where to begin, where to begin...
OK, let's start at the start. I guess the producers thought it would be a cute effect to give the German protagonist an English accent, so that we could see the similarities. However, rather than being cute it's confusing. Probably deliberately so, but as a plot device it falls flat. Once in miraculously-always-clean uniform, the distinction is made.
Next. Our protagonists on both sides volunteer in 1914, and are rapidly in the front line. This could be correct for a German Kriegsfreiwilliger, but was highly likely not to be the case for a British 1914 volunteer - the first units raised in 1914 didn't see action until 1915, and many not until the Somme.
There's so much that's wrong about it, I'll just list a few of the many, many massive clangers:
OK, let's start at the start. I guess the producers thought it would be a cute effect to give the German protagonist an English accent, so that we could see the similarities. However, rather than being cute it's confusing. Probably deliberately so, but as a plot device it falls flat. Once in miraculously-always-clean uniform, the distinction is made.
Next. Our protagonists on both sides volunteer in 1914, and are rapidly in the front line. This could be correct for a German Kriegsfreiwilliger, but was highly likely not to be the case for a British 1914 volunteer - the first units raised in 1914 didn't see action until 1915, and many not until the Somme.
There's so much that's wrong about it, I'll just list a few of the many, many massive clangers:
- Trenches apparently untouched by 7 days of bombardment.
- Soldiers who, we are told, haven't been able to eat or drink for 7 days somehow manage to find enough water to shave.
- Soldiers in the line practically all the time.
- A British front-line dugout that was roomy, well-lit, contained bunkbeds, with soldiers sleeping on mattresses under blankets, in their underwear, right before a big battle.
- Everyone dying at the Somme aside from out two protagonists, who are then free to wander around the battlefield.
- A West Indies Regiment corporal commanding British privates (err, nope, not in WW1, really, that could never have happened) for a prisoner escort through a miraculously untouched British-looking pine forest just behind the lines. Apparently the German lines were just beyond the untouched wood. If you only know one thing about WW1, it's that there were parallel lines of trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss border, so the idea that the German trenches were just beyond a wood IN THE BRITISH REAR is totally, ridiculously laughable.