Disappointingly dreary war tale no Gallipoli
Before the recent trio of technical and emotive marvels that were They Shall Not Grow Old, 1917 and All Quiet on the Western Front, my favourite movie about the Great War was Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.
While it might have traumatised many of my contemporaries forced to study it as part of School Certificate English, I found it to be a coming-of-age tale that was compelling and heartbreaking at the same time.
Featuring a charismatic young Mel Gibson (and the little-known Mark Lee), it boasted searing imagery (culminating in one of the most stunning and haunting final images ever committed to celluloid) and an amazingly atmospheric soundtrack that included haunting tunes by both JeanMichel Jarre and Tomaso Albinoni.
Now more than four decades on from that triumph, another Australian director has delivered a thematically similar drama, albeit a far more conventional, frustratingly fractured one focused on one young man’s misadventures in France (not Turkey) during the hostilities in World War I.
Dedicated to his grandfather and apparently based on real diary entries from Anzac soldiers, Jordan Prince-Wright’s Before Dawn is the story of Jim Collins (A Wrinkle in Time’s Levi Miller, who looks remarkably like the young Russell Crowe did in the early 90s).
Persuaded by his mates to leave behind “the dirt, sheep and horse s…” of his family’s remote Western Australia station for the excitement of the battlefields in Europe, Jim promises his upset parents that he’ll be “home in six months”. It’s 1916.
It isn’t long before he discovers that life with the 44th Battalion isn’t exactly glamorous and is – in fact – downright deadly – especially after he becomes the only survivor of a seemingly routine mission into enemy territory.
Lambasted for sparing a German soldier’s life, Jim develops a reputation for risking his own to save others. “All this thoughtless hero stuff is going to land us all in trouble,” embittered fellow Private Thomas Nickels (Travis Jeffery) opines.
Despite its title, Prince-Wright’s first solo feature actually works best in the daytime scenes where you can really feel for the mud-caked troops, increasingly bogged down and showered in dirt as the bullets and bombs fly.
But while the young cast do their best to bring this intimate epic to life, they are hampered by a soggy script that offers few fresh ideas.
Action set-pieces aside, Prince-Wright and visual effects specialist Jarrad Russell’s script offers little more than regrets, recriminations and ploddingly predictable character arcs. By the time someone finally, inevitably, admits to being “scared” and “just wants to go home”, you’re likely to have lost interest and be keen to do the same.
Before Dawn is in select cinemas nationwide.