george-841 I generally enjoy war movies, particularly WW2, and I'm not obsessively fanatical about true-to-life details. But this movie is just not very good.It starts out with great potential. The new lieutenant's introduction to the dangers of the British 88's, where he burns one of his "three miracles" definitely grabs one's attention. The sniper incident is also interesting. The soldier's personalities are sympathetic and you do come to care for them.But there is a bit too much lack of realism. The scene with Mussolini's horse is absolutely ridiculous. While it's evidently true that El Duce had his horse (which was white, not black as shown here) sent to Africa in order to ride it in a triumphal march into Egypt, I very much doubt it was loaded into an ordinary army truck strewn with hay and driven around aimlessly by a couple of lost-and-clueless Italian truck drivers! The other truck was loaded with shoe polish so the soldiers could polish up their boots for the event... pull the other one! There are also too many scenes of soldiers traveling through the desert hatless and with minimal gear... at times without even a canteen. In the desert of North Africa you're not getting far without head protection and without water. The actors aren't even particularly tanned... without hats their heads would be sun-burnt! Beyond issues of realism, which can be dismissed in pursuit of a good story... well, there isn't really a good story. The Italians are bombed presumably by the Brits (who are hardly ever seen) and they get their butts kicked, but any battle scenes are left to the imagination in mostly dark shots of night fighting with bombs exploding in the distance. I'm guessing the budget didn't allow for scenes of tank battles, although that would have been nice to include in a movie about a WW2 front where battles between tanks were the essence of strategy and tactics.The film does give a sense of the hot white emptiness of the desert battle front but beyond that it's rather tedious. By halfway thru the movie I was counting the minutes to the end.

Giuseppe Alvaro This is a good movie of men in war, not a war movie Hollywood style. It shows the madness of war and (at the beginning at least) reminds me of the surreal atmosphere of another great movie, "Il deserto dei tartari". El Alamein - Linea di Fuoco is a movie that gives at last some justice to the brave men who fought and died in Africa for their country, at that time led by a dangerous gambler, not because they were fascists (those stayed far from the battlefront) but because they felt it was their duty. They didn't lack courage or skills but the means of more advanced industrial powers - the German-Anglo-Saxon reputation in warfare being largely due to superior production and logistics. Showing how Italy could fall in love for "Il Duce" was clearly out of this movie scope and reach, but perhaps it will help reading again this quotation attributed to a world expert in this field, Herr Hermann Goering: "People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country". In our days, our leaders do not even have to show us we are being attacked - see headlines for "preemptive war", "Iraq", "Iran"...

PWNYCNY The problem with this movie is not so much the movie itself, though the movie does not lack in technical glitches, but rather the historical context in which the story is set. The director tries to tell a story about Italian soldiers in World War Two, suggesting that they are hapless victims of incompetent commanders who basically had them fighting in a hopeless cause, period. This narrow theme produces a two-dimensional story that completely ignores the fundamental reason why the Italians were in the fighting in the first place: to achieve the strategic goals of Adolf Hitler. As a result, this movie is dramatically flat. The Italian soldiers are portrayed as self-sacrificing, suffering and heroic when in fact they were invaders who were brought all their problems on themselves. In an interesting twist, the British are portrayed as faceless automatons who mercilessly drive through the depleted Italian lines, as if it were the British who were the bad guys. That the Italian soldiers were capable of acts of courage on the battlefield is not the question. Rather, the question is why were they fighting in the first place, and any movie, especially a movie that is set in World War Two, that avoids dealing with that question is fundamentally flawed.

GTFM A very realistic depiction of the famous World War II battle, from the point of view of some common Italian soldiers, this movie lack of any kind of rethoric, nor pacifistic neither heroic. It's something like a good Vietnam movie from American directors, as "Platoon" or "Hamburger Hill". A must for everyone who wants to know more about Italian war in Africa