Saint and Soldiers: Airborne Creed takes place in southern France during Operation Dragoon in August 1944. Three members of the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team, dropped over a dozen miles from where they're supposed to be, manage to find each other and head off to try to rejoin their unit. Along the way, they encounter Emilie, a female French resistance member who needs their help to rescue some members of her group. Their paths cross, directly and indirectly, that of a German 2nd lieutenant named Neumann.
First, I have to commend the makers on the look of the film: the cinematography is aesthetically pleasing, and clothing, weapons and even haircuts are, as far as I can tell, mostly accurate for the period. The Germans look a bit ragtag (e.g. wearing a mix of boots), but that's credible given that the German units occupying southern France were "minor league," scraped together from reservists and the like. The scenery and vegetation were (to my eye) a bit too western United States rather than southern France, but the makers clearly did their best to pick locations that weren't too obviously out of place (and they certainly did a better job than the producers of To Hell And Back).
The main problem with this film is that it lacks focus: the various stories being told are too insubstantial and insufficiently cohesive to hold the film together, and we're left wondering what the film was really about. Apart from an occasional burst of sadness, none of the characters display much in the way of emotion, probably because the script doesn't give them anything to be emotional about. The two characters with a modicum of back story are written out of the script two-thirds of the way through, though that's in a way fortunate, since they are also the most annoying (not least because they have recurring flashbacks to tell us something that was abundantly clear from their respective first ones and didn't need rehashing).
Moreover, the script is just too sanitized. Nobody swears, hardly anybody smokes (only two rapidly dispatched Germans), and the Neumann character seems to be meant to come off as sympathetic even though at the start of the film, he oversees the execution of Emilie's father and brother. If I had to sum this film up in one word, it would be "anodyne": an hour and half of pretty but eminently forgettable World War II wallpaper.
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