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A War doesn’t take long to get across the horrors of conflict when we see a soldier become a victim of an IED, or improvised explosive device – namely, a landmine. Following this, their commanding officer, Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk), takes the lead in going on patrol with them, instead of staying well behind the frontline. Elsewhere, there’s Claus’ wife Maria (Tuva Novotny), shown stuck at home, trying to keep the family together in the absence of her husband.
When they take Compound 6, one man is down and they suspect he was felled by the Taliban. Claus comes across as the man who can do right by his fellow soldiers, but what happens when the accusations start to fly about his apparent request to bomb the area by those who deemed it a civilian location?
Before this, you mostly see the soldiers getting through a number of random incidents which, while I know that’ll be reflective of what an army is expected to experience, those scenes are not as engaging as I thought the film would be. However, it does improve as it goes on, leading to engaging courtroom scenes, where Asbæk gets to star alongside Søren Malling. It’s always good to see the pair of them working together on film and TV, as they have done in Borgen, 1864, as well as writer/director Tobias Lindholm‘s A Hijacking, which I have still yet to see.
However, he also wrote most of the recent Follow The Money, which was a hell of a drama and highly worth ten hours of your time.
The review disc I received didn’t have any proper menu or extras, so it’s difficult to tell how representative this is of the finished product, but since it had 12 chapters to the film and the picture looked the same as most well-produced DVDs do, in that I find the picture a little soft compared to a Blu-ray, those aspects are most likely quite representative. Also, it contained Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, where the dialogue goes into the separate rear speakers as the camera moves around the troops when they’re out and about.
Film only: 7/10
A War is released tomorrow on Blu-ray and DVD, and click on the packshot for the full-size image.
Cert: 
Running time: 111 minutes
Year: 2015
Released: May 9th 2016
Chapters: 12
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
Languages: Danish, Arabic, English
Subtitles: English
Widescreen: 1.85:1
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Producers: Rene Ezra and Tomas Radoor
Screenplay: Tobias Lindholm
Music: Sune Wagner
Cast :
Claus Michael Pedersen: Pilou Asbæk
Maria Pedersen: Tuva Novotny
Najib Bisma: Dar Salim
Martin R. Olsen: Søren Malling
Lisbeth Danning: Charlotte Munck
Lutfi Hassan: Dulfi Al-Jabouri
Terkel Sand: Jakob Frølund
Brian Brask: Phillip Sem Dambæk
Anders: Alex Høgh Andersen
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.