Matt Vs. Monuments Men.

George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, and Bill Murray star in Monuments Men a film that is both a war film and an art celebration. During World War II the US Government sent a team of specialists, historians and preservationists who's main job was to try and save Europe's cultural and artistic treasures from the ravages of war. The movie opens rather powerfully with Italians frantically working to save DaVinci's Last Supper from the bombing and gunfire erupting around it. Furthermore the Nazis have robbed Europe's museums of their treasures to feed Adolph Hitler's insatiable appetite for dominance and control. George Clooney's character leads an team that goes into Western Europe in an effort to locate and reclaim the stolen.

For most of the film, it focuses on specifically the Ghent Alterpiece and the Madonna and Child statue. The movie repeatably brings up the issue whether art and cultural objects are worth human lives. The Monuments men are not free from the bloodshed as a few die in the process of recovering the art. The army and several government higher ups had to be convinced and their mission is often mocked compared to the more solemn duty of winning the war. The movie states that while people will die once someone's culture is destroyed you remove those people from existence. A person is mortal while their achievements may prove to me be immortal.

While I enjoyed the movie I felt that the pacing was disjointed and that its tone was all over the place. At parts it seems to be channeling Saving Private Ryan while other times it gave me flashbacks of Ocean's Eleven. While Clooney isn't exactly playing Danny Ocean, the roles are very similar. Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett's character interaction was amusing but I feel did not add much to the film. I found it hard to keep pace of the timeline of what was going on and I did not notice the passage of time from July 1944 to May 1945. Oftentimes the film struggled to handle its cast of characters and jumped from scene to scene. Overall I think that this movie while having its high points was brought down by its unevenness in tone.

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