Rasmussen is the one character who grows during the film, and Møller handles the transformation effortlessly. The only performer who has any room to work is Møller who gets to play both righteous anger and sympathy for the boys in his care. It’s almost as if someone cloned the Germans or as if Zandvliet had tried a writing exercise where he populated the de-mining crew with identical versions of the same character. 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.
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. It's an effective opening, with the impressive lead actor Roland Møller - a tanned, chiselled forty-something - setting the tone for the film's exploration of moral ambiguity and even corruption among the victorious and apparently virtuous (a theme echoed when a young mother living close to the beach utters a casual, blood-chilling condemnation of the prisoners).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. We meet him as he singles out a prisoner in a line of captured German soldiers and beats him to a pulp for taking home a Danish flag as a souvenir.
The story focuses on a Danish officer assigned a small group of prisoners.
Their unearthing of deadly explosives on a remote, pristine beach evokes a metaphor of repressed traumas and shameful peacetime forgetting. Obviously, the poignant aspect to this bloodletting, writ large in a film so connected to the tragedy of actual history, renders this a powerful anti-war statement.įorced into this heinous task, the characters are like lambs to the slaughter.
The subsequent experience is not unlike watching a horror movie where, one by one, cast members meet a grisly end.