Tin Soldier

The dragged De Niro into this.

This film left me actually angry not because of what it was, but because of what it could have been. Tin Soldiers poses an interesting question: What if a charismatic leader turned PSTD affected soldiers into his own private army?

There's ample questions to dig into there. A film could interrogate our country's relationship with veterans and how we decide to go to war. It could look at how easily it is for private militaries to acquire weapons and tools of war in modern America. It could be about the danger of personality-driven politics.

Unfortunately, instead of examining it's premise, the film uses it as the first point in a really bad example of 'and then' plotting and then commits basically every writing sin there is (narration, flashbacks, dream sequences) in 90 minutes of "tell, don't show."

The big thing, the one that really got under my skin, was that the film uses a repeated scenario to show the protagonist's growth. But instead of starting the story with this knowledge, the two scenarios (history and present) are presented simultaneously which robs the audience of the change to celebrate that growth.