I finally finished Warriors. I'm not going to avoid spoilers because chances are you will never see this movie. It isn't even available in England any more. I bought a VHS copy on EBay.

Gasp! Is Sandy advocating piracy? No, not for movies that are widely available. Many movies, however, are impossible to come by unless you buy from an unauthorized source. Sorry, I have no problems with the latter form of piracy. Lesson to companies: your smaller products may have a shot in odd markets. Find a way to market them if you want to stop that sort of piracy. I will have no problem with buying this movie again if I could get it on DVD.

To reiterate, Warriors is about British troops who are sent to Bosnia in the fall of 1992 as part of a United Nations Peacekeeping force. They are only there to ensure that humanitarian aid gets to the people who need it. We see what happens in Bosnia through the eyes of four soldiers - Private James (Mathew MacFadyen), Sargeant Sochanik (Cal Macaninch), Leftenant Loughrey (Damian Lewis), and Leftenant Feeley (Ioan Gruffudd) (YOO-an Griffith. I love Welsh names).

James is an easygoing bloke (the British version of an ordinary Joe) who loves Soccer (sorry, football) and has a good nature. Sochanik is an older man whose parents were refugees who fled to Scotland. He is best described as stoic (for the most part). Loughrey is about to be married and Feeley is a career soldier who doesn't seem to have any ties to the civilian world.

The movie begins with these four men in England (Liverpool, mostly), each reacting differently to the news of their callup to go to Bosnia. Sochanik is hit hardest, having had to deal recently with his brother's death in a farming accident. Loughrey has a tough time explaining things to his fiance, who is planning their wedding.

Once they get to Bosnia, each of them get subjected to apalling sights and has to watch as bad things happen to people they have come to care about. James sees a refugee wearing a soccer (sorry, FOOTBALL) shirt and tries to get the young man out of a killing zone but only ends up getting the man arrested and himself in trouble. Sochanik is harrassed and verbally abused by some Serbian thugs because of his ancestry.
Loughrey and Feeley continually want to evacuate people but their superiors shoot them down for a grotesquely stupid reason:

They can't evacuate anyone unless they are injured because it is feared that this will look like they are participating in 'ethnic cleansing'. In other words, they would be perceived as helping the Serbs drive the Croats and Muslims out of their homes (or vice versa). Feeley intervenes by himself once when he sees a family getting mistreated. He comes by later only to discover that the bad guys came back and killed them all. Both he and Loughrey finally disobey orders and get a group of people away from certain death; their enlisted men support them, and so surprisingly does their commanding officer. Apparently they aren't too happy with their orders, either.

But that action was a spit in the ocean; Loughrey, despite his fiance (who turns out to get pregnant), gets involved with one of their interpreters. This affair upsets Feeley, but he has his own problems when he gets too close to a Muslim woman whose husband has gone off to fight (hey, it's a TV movie). Bad things happen here too, of course. Also, poor good-hearted James gets subjected to a horrific task; he has to search a truckfull of dead bodies because one of them is alive.

The movie ends with everyone back home and how they deal with it (badly). James goes off on a mother and her whining child in a supermarket, coming across as a lunatic. Despite some wonderful support from family and friends, what he was subjected to has damaged him. Sochanik is obviously affected, but coming from a long line of refugees seems to handle it best. Loughrey's implosion is manifested when he lashes out at his girlfriend physically. It is a split-second action which he can't even explain to the police. Feeley, who has been very reserved and acts like nothing has happened, eventually tries to kill himself. Some of his men stop him.

The movie is low-budget, but the producers do the best with what they have. Violence is kept offscreen; some blood is shown but for the most part the atrocities are reflected in the reactions of the soldiers. There's some cussing but only in extreme emotional sequences. I found the acting to be pretty low-key but I suppose that's that British stoicism. I think the understated manner of this film helped get across what these men went through. The quality of acting is what I expect of a BBC production. If I have one complaint I had a hard time with some of the accents. This complaint is why I would buy it on DVD only so I could get the closed captions. I have to watch a lot of British and Australian movies with the closed captioning on.

So much for the technical aspects. This movie had one fascinating theme that you don't often get from war movies: that was the theme of emasculation. These men are soldiers and they are incapable of doing anything useful. I don't mean whipping out an automatic weapon and mowing down the bad guys; I mean using their skills and weaponry as a threat to stop the looting, raping, and murder. Can you imagine being a member of the British army, the descendants of the great Empire builders, and having some pea-brained thug do whatever he wants in front of you because he know he can get away with it? The worst threat they can muster is telling the thugs they will be 'arrested and tried as war criminals'. Ooh, scary. They are so restrained from doing anything that when Sochanik gets in a thug's face and can only hurl insults and threats, he is regarded as a hero by the other men (and is of course put up on charges).

This movie did nothing to change my views of getting involved in other people's problems.