This would have been a better film if it had stuck to the father-looking-for-lost-sons plot. Tacking on the civil war violence was a mistake.  What’s the point of depicting the Turks as just as much victims of WWI, if you then go on to demonise the Greeks?  Russell Crowe is always good onscreen, but Olga Kurylenko was deeply unconvincing as a woman of her time and culture.

Didn’t like the tired old cliche about the pompous dickhead British officer and while we’re on that subject I didn’t like the historical howlers …

…. such as the implication that the Gallipoli campaign was an exclusively Australian/New Zealand experience.  When Russell Crowe first meets the Turkish woman as a potential guest at her inn, she asks if he is English and on finding out he is Australian she turns hostile.  What?!!!  The Turks would have seen the Gallipoli invasion as a British action, and the Australians and New Zealanders as British colonials.  In any case, the British lost many more men at Gallipoli than the Anzacs did and would have caused many more of the Turkish deaths.

AND the term ‘Anzac’ didn’t come into use till long after the war ended.

This was first posted to Facebook on 14.1.15