Military Movie and Series Reviews – March 2017

An image of one of the posters for the series "Plane Resurrection" courtesy of the PBS Network.

With the modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on a bit of a break, I decided to take a little break myself and post my reviews of real life or fictional movies or series with military themes that I have seen over the last couple of months. Admittedly all of these materials I have seen are from Netflix, but I did try to include other sources also for them if they are available.

WWII: 1941 AND THE MAN OF STEEL (Five out of Five Stars)
Link: http://www.tpt.org/world-war-two-1941-and-the-man-of-steel/

Available on Netflix, Youtube, DVD and the PBS Network, this series consists of two 45 minute episodes and is originally produced by BBC. This is an absolutely fascinating documentary of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia in World War Two (WW2) from the viewpoint of the Russians. At its center is Josef Stalin, it shows his biography including his inner circle and how he rose into power and transformed Russia.

Movie Review: Heneral Luna

(Revised October 2, 2015. See bottom of the page for the complete revision history)

The "Heneral Luna" movie poster. Photo courtesy of Artikulo Uno.

I just got to see the movie “Heneral Luna”,^[1] and it is absolutely fantastic, a true masterpiece. To me it is not only the best local movie of the year, but one of the best movies of the year anywhere. The film didn’t do well initially at the Box Office, by the end of its first week of run the number of cinemas showing it was cut by half so there was a call for people to watch it and keep it in the theaters. But after that slow start the movie started gaining traction mainly by virtue of word of mouth and Social Media,^[2] so much so that by the time I watched it on its third week of release, the theater was still FULL or almost sold out.

’A Well-Made Film’
There is a lot to like about this film, first is its excellent Production Values, from the well-made period costumes, to the quality of the film and the cinematography of the movie, it is all comparable to any Hollywood films out there right now. They even did some aerial Drone shots that contributed a lot to the movie’s fantastic visuals.

History Channel SEA Special Forces, Thai Marine Recon and Series Reflections

The History Channel Asia showed it third and last of its special feature on the Special Forces in South East Asia on Sunday, September 16, 2012, and this time it is Thailand's Marine Recon force. I feel lucky I got to see this one on its first airing, and like Malaysia's GGK episode, this one is quite impressive as well.

Their training started with a "Phase 1" training based on land. This phase was broken down into a stages, with the first stage consisted of extreme physical exercises that saw the weakest recruits both physically and mentally being weeded out. The next stage saw the recruits broken down into teams, and each team asked to not only to march but also navigate to a destination 100 km while away carrying heavy logs.

In the last stage of Phase 1, each team was placed into rubber boats and asked to paddle to a destination at night. As if that was not enough, upon reaching their destinations, the candidates were then dunked into barrels of freezing water after all that exertion to further test them mentally.

History Channel SEA Special Forces, Force Recon and GGK

Histroy Channel Asia released a new set of shows this month of September, 2012 regarding the Special Forces of South East Asian (SEA) countries. They only announced three shows so far, I don't know if they will be doing more. The three shows cover the Philippines' "Marine Force Recon (FR)", Malaysia's "Grup Gerak Khas (GGK)", and one of Thailand's Special Forces.

The Philippines MFR and GGK were shown back to back Sunday, September 9, 2012, while the Thailand feature will be shown a week later. Documentary channels like "The History Channel" have before done shows on Special Forces from other countries, particularly from the United States, but this is the first time it has done so for SEA Special Forces in recent memory.

I highly anticipated the shows, and I was lucky enough to have caught the first two installments, and I was left a bit stunned, and confused after watching them.