World War II Collection (The Thin Red Line/Patton/Tora! Tora! Tora!/The Longest Day)

Tora! Tora! Tora!
"Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north, 140 miles, 3 degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." This is just one of the many mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora! The epic film shows the bombing of Pearl Harbor from both sides in the historic first American-Japanese coproduction: American director Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated production, wrestling a sprawling story with dozens of characters into a manageable, fairly easy-to-follow film. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war movies, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos, and the immense destruction of the attack. --Sean Axmaker

Patton
One of the greatest screen biographies ever produced, this monumental film runs nearly three hours, won seven Academy Awards, and gave George C. Scott the greatest role of his career. Scott embodies his role so fully, so convincingly, that we can't help but be drawn to and fascinated by Patton as a man who is simultaneously bound for hell and glory. Filmed on an epic scale at literally dozens of European locations, Patton does not embrace war as a noble pursuit, nor does it deny the reality of war as a breeding ground for heroes. Through the awesome achievement of Scott's performance and the film's grand ambition, Patton shows all the complexities of a man who accepted his role in life and (like Scott) played it to the hilt. --Jeff Shannon

The Longest Day
The Longest Day is Hollywood's definitive D-day movie. More modern accounts such as Saving Private Ryan are more vividly realistic, but producer Darryl F. Zanuck's epic 1962 account is the only one to attempt the daunting task of covering that fateful day from all perspectives. From the German high command and front-line officers to the French Resistance and all the key Allied participants, the screenplay by Cornelius Ryan, based on his own authoritative book, is as factually accurate as possible. The endless parade of stars (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton, to name a few) makes for an uneasy mix of verisimilitude and Hollywood star-power, however, and the film falls a little flat for too much of its three-hour running time. But the set-piece battles are still spectacular, and if the landings on Omaha Beach lack the graphic gore of Private Ryan, they nonetheless show the sheer scale and audacity of the invasion. --Mark Walker

Description
Contains: *Thin Red Line, The *Tora! Tora! Tora! *Patton *Longest Day, The

Maintaining a very slow pace throughout its three and half hours lenght, in the 'Thin Red Line' more Japanese soldiers are shown surrendering in the few hours of combat depicted than actually did the first three years of the Pacific war! (If you do not believe me, look up Tarawa, New Guinea, Marshall Islands, and Iwo Jima for example.) And of course the Americans are shown almost to last as the inhuman beasts and the Japanese as noble Samurai.

Following in the tradition of the racist epic 'Birth to a Nation', movies like the Thin Red Line and Pearl Harbor are rewriting ouf history. For example, in Pearl Harbor the Japanese are depicted as being justified in attacking, when actually the United States stopped selling the Japanese oil because they were allies with Hitler, making war on China, and had just invaded French Indochina.


I'll tell you why...   February 8, 2004
 17 out of 18 found this review helpful

To answer another reviewer's question: Why would you buy this set when you can get the individual films cheaper? You can't buy the individual films cheaper.

The version of "Patton" in this set is the 2-disc Special Edition, which is out of print except for in this set, and selling for more than the price of this entire set on auction sites.

So save some money, get the 2-disc version of Patton, and get three other great WWII films for free (essentially).


Two bad movies for the price of five   December 13, 2002
 4 out of 69 found this review helpful

Let's face it...the Thin Red Line is the most boring war movie ever made. Tora Tora Tora is very outdated, and although it does show the attack upon Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective, it is very much outclassed by the newer movie, "Pearl Harbor,"