Where Eagles Dare
Posted by J on July 19, 2008
Where Eagles Dare is pure military fantasy. It’s what boys dream about before going to bed, right after their 
great-grandpas tell them stories about taking on the Wehrmacht. Well, probably not these days, since kids now go to their bedrooms, sit in isolation, and kill whole squads of Nazis on their Xbox. But the video game fantasy is all the same as a mental dreamland, which is where this movie came from. This means that military purists, those who get prickled by a movie’s gross distortion of reality, will probably walk away from this movie in the first hour, if that.
The setup is that six soldiers, five British special ops guys and Clint Eastwood, have to rescue a high-ranking American general from a well-fortified castle in the Alps. And what else do you need? The next two-plus hours is about penetrating the castle by stealth and getting the general out of there. The one problem is that there’s a German mole amongst these six guys who’s betraying them, killing them or getting them captured. Since this movie stars Clint Eastwood, problems like this will be solved.
We mentioned realism. It is slightly silly that this special ops force has to sneak into a castle guarded by a huge Nazi training center, and that the castle is so far above ground level that the cable-car ride into it looks like an ascent into heaven. It is far more silly that the commanding officer, Richard Burton, secretly has another soldier follow them; this soldier being a petite blonde whom Burton has to kiss every time he sees her. But this is far from all the ridiculousness. What really got us was that when Burton and Eastwood dress up as Nazis and walk into the huge compound, they continue talking in plain English, with their natural British and American accents! And the Nazis just accept this, as if an American in a Nazi uniform can promenade around their heavily-armed military installations. There are several more egregious portrayals of a special ops mission, which is why we label this a fantasy.
What can you get out of this movie? It’s probably better than playing Xbox for two-and-a-half hours. But it’s about like eating a box of Krispy Kremes for breakfast. Tastes great, no nutritional value, temporarily deadens the brain after consumption.
Entertainment: starts at 8, slides down to 2 for the first 45 minutes, goes back up to 8
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 3
