I saw Ordinary People at a film festival in Novi Sad, Serbia. It looks like it attempts to tell us something about war, death, crime and people who are involved in it. But I don't think it succeeds at anything other than boring the audience to tears.
It's a story about boredom and emptiness of lives of one group of soldiers who end up being war criminals. Throughout the movie, they mostly just sit around, drink, smoke, talk very little and look really bored, while audience does pretty much the same. Characters seem to be very bored so they kill time by occasionally executing prisoners. There is no context, no background and no story, it's just about a random bored group of individuals with guns executing another, similar looking random bored group of individuals without guns.
It must be hard to make an otherwise very real human tragedy seem so boring, but the director manages it very well. The film drags on for 1 hour and 20 minutes and at the end you cannot help but be amazed at how little you can see in such a long time.
It's a story about boredom and emptiness of lives of one group of soldiers who end up being war criminals. Throughout the movie, they mostly just sit around, drink, smoke, talk very little and look really bored, while audience does pretty much the same. Characters seem to be very bored so they kill time by occasionally executing prisoners. There is no context, no background and no story, it's just about a random bored group of individuals with guns executing another, similar looking random bored group of individuals without guns.
It must be hard to make an otherwise very real human tragedy seem so boring, but the director manages it very well. The film drags on for 1 hour and 20 minutes and at the end you cannot help but be amazed at how little you can see in such a long time.