Turning Points: The Day The War Changed

It is generally thought that in 1944 there were three main events which signalled turning points in the Second World War: The closing in from the East of the Red Army to take out Germany’s Army Group Centre; the landing of the Allied forces in Normandy; and the pushing through from the South, at Anzio in Italy, by Allied forces as they made their way towards Rome. In Turning Points: The Day The War Changed it is the latter situation which Canadian filmmaker Michael Dorosh wants to focus on, being as it was where the joint Canadian/US forces of the ‘Devil’s Brigade’ made a breakthrough in the German line, and is therefore the story which is most relevant and personal to him.

Enlisting the aid of ‘The First Special Service Force Living History Association of Alberta’, a local historical re-enactment group of which he is a part, Dorosh was able to get free access to period uniforms, equipment and firearms as well as, of course, actors who were knowledgeable and willing to LARP about in the woods as soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Dorosh uses his pals to act out a fictional situation between the ‘Devil’s Brigade’ and a German Hand Grenade Division unit, using his time to get into the everyday situations of a soldier on the front line.

The story is told in voiceover, from commanders on either side of the line, as though reading from their diaries or field correspondence. This is then matched with stock footage from the war mixed in with Dorosh’s new material to create some sort of setting for the scenario. However, the deep horror and tragedy being described in the audio very rarely links up with the images we see on screen and whenever we hear the war it always seems to be happening all around, but never within sight of the camera.

In fact, very little that we see on screen has anything to do with the war or fighting at all. While the voiceover talks about previous battles or how the war is going, all we see are four or five guys going through their packs, reading letters from home or distributing equipment. There is only minimal dialogue from the characters to help us get to know them and so everything espoused in the voiceover means nearly nothing at all to the viewer when we can’t relate it to anything or anyone on screen.

Additionally, the voiceover is really pretty boring. No matter which side we happen to be on, the expository information is talked at us in incessantly monotone voices, with no real action or excitement to speak of. It is very hard for the viewer not to switch off as the voiceover drones on about banal, made-up stuff, which seems to deliberately avoid conflict when it includes a grenade which doesn’t explode and a ‘well-disciplined enemy who knew enough to hold his fire’.

Everything in Turning Points seems to have been done in order to avoid conflict, and in a war movie that has to be the biggest mistake of all. Not one character fires a gun once, despite the enemy standing right in front of them, and when a firefight does start it is at a distance with drawn in tracer bullets to tell us that something is actually happening. Oddly, Dorosh says that at the top of his mind as he was developing the film were the pitfalls of others that he wanted to avoid. These included ‘sometimes long, sometimes dull, consistently depressing shorts with bad acting, over the top special effects, bland characters and thin or non-existent storylines’. Yet, with the exception of the special effects this is exactly what he has created.

Sadly, Turning Points doesn’t offer anything to anyone excepting LARPing enthusiasts. It is not historically accurate enough for war buffs, it’s not got any action for movie-goers, and it doesn’t have a well told story or even minimally drawn characters for people who like – well – the basics. It is a fictional account of real events which doesn’t do any justice to those who fought on those battlegrounds, and in the end feels like a Sunday re-enactment in the woods, despite the desire to honour the fallen.