This is a serious Norwegian movie from 1993 about their forebears feeble attempt to politely dissuade the Nazi army from taking an extended vacation in their territory in 1940. The story follows Esper Stormblade (seriously. I think.) a retired coast guard captain. He glares in grandfatherly disaproval as the Norwegian high command runs a tightly competitive race to surrender the fastest. If you know anything about WWII, you will comes across frequent references to "occupied Norway", but not much discussion of what effort it took to get that way. Answer: Very little.
Esper rounds up a bunch of naive farm boys and middle aged blue collar types and heads to the mountains to form La Resistance with lilting accents. He is very gruff and gives lots of good subtitled speeches throughout the movie, and manages to not be cliche.
They have 150 troops, and we see them undergoing some impromptu infantry training, and they're all nice guys. So nice in fact, on their very first guerilla ambush which goes perfectly, (except the part where they show up to soon and almost shoot a guy on a tractor) taking about twenty prisoners, killing maybe five Wehrmact in the process, with zero friendly casualties. Well Norway's finest are pretty shaken up by all this, and they dig graves with full honors and cry a bit. Then they go back to HQ, flirt with girls, read umlaut literature, and reminisce about how their fishing trawler almost got capsized last season. In short, these guys are desperately out of their element. This becomes readily apparent when one of their elite grunts cracks under the pressure of, gasp, guard duty, and lets all his POWs go. Outraged, Esper puts him in front of a firing squad, but at the last minute relents and gives a speech both shaming the perpetrator and admitting they are all in a shitty situation. At this point, Esper and his two right hand men sit down and begin to process all the dire warnings that their ex-superiors have been smugly dispatching while speeding away from any hint of front lines in a flurry of abandoned paperwork. Esper's little display of indignant patriotism got his team an easy cheap shot, but the real-deal fascist war machine is rolling through the countryside enroute. Esper is not a zealot. He does not want to march 150 productive citizens to slaughter. Esper decides to sleep on it, but the Luftwaffe makes up his mind for him with a quick bombing-run/wake-up-call. Forlornly, reality sets in and the men are disbanded and Esper literally sits alone in the road waiting for the tanks. Roll credits.
All right enough mockery. Americans have been spoonfed war movies for decades about heroic bravery and solemn determination and noble sacrifice, etc. Norwegians just wanted to live their lives. They didn't want to get killed and they didn't want to be a puppet state and they didn't want to have to kill anybody either. Its an impossible situation.
Last Lieutenant succeeds because its a war movie about people who don't want to fight in the first place, don't have a chance, come to realize it and give up before they all get massacred. Because thats what people do when they want to live to see tomorrow. They don't give cliched gung ho speeches and miraculously win because they care more, and if they have a choice in the matter, they try not to walk blindly into total death. So I found this to be a refreshing change to, "goodguys always win against impossible odds", or "goodguys martyr themselves for the cause", type war movies.
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