X
- 2016
- R
- TriStar Pictures
- 1 h 53 m
- 2016
- R
- TriStar Pictures
- 1 h 53 m
Summary Based on the widely-acclaimed, bestselling novel, the film is told from the point of view of 19-year-old private Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) who, along with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad, becomes a hero after a harrowing Iraq battle and is brought home temporarily for a victory tour. Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular hal...
Directed By: Ang Lee
Written By: Ben Fountain, Jean-Christophe Castelli
- 2016
- R
- TriStar Pictures
- 1 h 53 m
- 2016
- R
- TriStar Pictures
- 1 h 53 m
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
53
6.0
Where to Watch
Summary Based on the widely-acclaimed, bestselling novel, the film is told from the point of view of 19-year-old private Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) who, along with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad, becomes a hero after a harrowing Iraq battle and is brought home temporarily for a victory tour. Through flashbacks, culminating at the spectacular hal...
Directed By: Ang Lee
Written By: Ben Fountain, Jean-Christophe Castelli
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 42 Critic Reviews
53
31% Positive
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
64% Mixed
27 Reviews
27 Reviews
5% Negative
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 42 Critic Reviews
53
31% Positive
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
64% Mixed
27 Reviews
27 Reviews
5% Negative
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
The acting and script are so strong that the picture is an outstanding achievement even in the 2D version that most people will see.
No Iraq movie has better captured our country’s nationalistic nonsense, and the inner chaos of the men and women returning home to this noise.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 70 User Ratings
6.0
47% Positive
33 Ratings
33 Ratings
39% Mixed
27 Ratings
27 Ratings
14% Negative
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 70 User Ratings
6.0
47% Positive
33 Ratings
33 Ratings
39% Mixed
27 Ratings
27 Ratings
14% Negative
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
A beautifully-shot masterpiece! It talks about issues that are deeper than war and troops. I didn't think it was possible, but I actually like this movie better than Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi. How can anyone hate this? The movie goes extremely deep. I really hope Ang Lee will win academy again as best director, even best picture!
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This is a good movie. All the discussion about it surrounds the technology used in making it, and that's necessary, but it's not the whole story -- nor is it NOT the story as others would have you believe. The simple fact is that this is a well-acted and at times completely engrossing anti-war picture, one that is more often than not, yes, let down by some of the failings of trying to show off the tech. Some scenes come across as incredibly "stage-y" for lack of a better word, and the lighting can be overlit fluorescent too often (like a docudrama).
However, that being said, I did have the pleasure of actually being able to see this on 3D bluray and I must say it's absolutely the most stunning 3D I think I've ever seen. There's an incredible amount of depth to so many scenes -- sometimes it's showy, but sometimes it's in service of the story like when Billy comes home and the entrance hallway seems to stretch on forever out in front of him, inviting him in to its embrace but also providing a dark trap. The essential conundrum, the doublethink, at the center of his inner workings.
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Ang Lee’s depiction of life after war (or on leave) is a respectful one not without derivative roadbumps, but honest in appeal.
As a 21st-century account of the soldier’s enduring alienation from the home front, Billy Lynn is highly effective. It’s what surrounds that account that doesn’t work.
Directing the film version, Lee gets lost in the grotesque pomp of the halftime spectacle and its lead-up. He gets fine performances from the actors playing the soldiers and a terrible one from Stewart, who flails her arms like an amateur. Martin’s role is beneath his talents, while Vin Diesel’s, as a Zen warrior of a sergeant, is almost beyond belief.
Real films breathe, alive with imperfections, accidents, with everything that Lee's worked so carefully to guard against. Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk is long, all right, but only half-alive — as careful as a diagram, as chilly as a statue.
Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most disappointing film of the year.
Game, music, celebration, romance, emotion, family, friends and the war!
After giving the career best, the director Ang Lee returned with this which is quite a long gap for him between the films. He has fallen back to the average, like usual whenever he gives a masterpiece. Most directors do that. This film was adapted from the book of the same name. It was not a full fledged war film. It has soldiers, but one day event theme where they are on the short break to homeland to participate in the felicitation programme for their victory.
The story closely focused on the young soldier, Billy, Lynn. He was the centre of the event, a war hero. During his stay, he recalls the original event. What really happened and what else he could have done. Apart from that, enjoying the day with a game from the stadium, dance, musics and many more. Meeting family has a sub-plot that reveals about his choice to join the army. Overall, a memorable day with happy and sad incidents.
So my first thought in the initial stage was like it is another film similar to the 2009's 'The Messenger'. No, it was not. It was completely different than anything I've seen so far. Refreshing, but not captivating. If you are okay with simple, yet want a feel strong, this is it. It is kind of like mixed result film. Great casting and strong performances. Wonderful debute for the lead actor.
On the other side, mix of colourful, full of music, emotional, romantic, thrilling presentation. A bit Americanised, like the film events and the patriotism. So, a much better suitable film for the domestic audience than the rest of the world, perhaps excluding western world. Even though, watching it once is no harm or not bad.
7/10
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Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is another movie exploring the struggle with PTSD back at home from war. I wish to say that Ang Lee faced it with a whole new approach or something like that, but he doesn’t. At least the story is told in a nonlinear way, center in the life at home with flashback to the war. Basically the struggle is the same as American Sniper, but with a young protagonist, without a clue of what he is doing with his life and a family mess. So you don’t get to see big consequences in his actual life choices, but instead just glimpses of trauma. There are two interesting things in this film, the technical way in which the war catches up to the protagonist and the truth about the show business that takes advantage of these poor traumatized soldiers. The movie is stimulating, definitely, but it’s more of the same topic. Ang Lee stays certainly in debt.
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Billy is a young soldier on a US victory tour with his squad after a heroic skirmish in Iraq. The narrative alternates between their recognition at a big football game and flashbacks to his family and his experiences in the military. The best thing about this film is the deeply nuanced and quietly sensitive portrayal of the title character by British actor Joe Alwyn. He manages to rise above the inert drama and endless preaching to bring emotion to his character (although he cries one time too many). The film's message about the sacrifices of our soldiers and the politics of war keeps pounding back…ultimately, becoming tiresome. While the performances are effective and some of the scenes have impact, director Ang Lee substitutes copious tears and ardent closeups for real drama. (That skirmish with the stagehands was a contrived excuse to trigger a climax.)
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Fashioned as an Awards favorite entering 2016, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk promised innovative technology in the form of 120fps and 4k, while being helmed by Ang Lee. Coming off of Life of Pi, one had to assume that this film would be Lee's triumphant war film to add to his resume. Unfortunately, it is an absolutely abhorrent film. Perhaps watching it on a television sells it a bit short without the technology, but the 120fps feels like it was nothing more than a band-aid, covering up the gaping and infected wound that is the script. The acting is equally horrible, but the film is akin to the Star Wars prequels. It has a script so bad that no actor could reasonably be expected to save the film and make the dialogue sound natural or anything better than unintentional comedy. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is worse than anyone could have ever imagined.
Starring Joe Alwyn as Billy Lynn, a man who fended off the "enemy" as he defended Sgt. Virgil Breen (Vin Diesel) from being attacked further, the video of the incident goes viral. As a result, Lynn and his fellow troops are shuttled around America on a thank you tour, culminating with an appearance at a not-the-Dallas Cowboys game. Appearing in the halftime show with Destiny's Child, the boys are greeted by definitely-not-Jerry Jones (Steve Martin), his stooges, and the many Americans who thank the troops just to feel better about themselves and meet their patriotism quota. Ang Lee's film explores this hollow patriotism, the horrors of war and what it does to young men in the form of PTSD, and is decidedly anti-war, but pro-soldier. Unfortunately, Lee's script misses the mark. With preachy dialogue that explains every little theme he wishes to explore in the film, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is in-your-face and entirely hamfisted. Rather than more nuanced looks at heroism and the need of American society to feel connected to the war through these young men, Lee's script merely preaches at the viewer for nearly two hours. The characters are all incredibly cookie cutter and the scenarios they find themselves in entirely laughable. For example, Wayne Foster (Tim Blake Nelson) - a successful oil industry man involved in fracking - approaches the soldiers to give them thanks and ask how the war is going. Sgt. David Dime (Garret Hedlund) responds by aggressively putting him in his place and preaching Lee's own personal anti-fracking beliefs. In a press conference, Lee has the soldiers being pestered with questions and, before they answer the question, Lynn imagines a fake response in black-and-white that is actually true. Answering a question about the progress of the war, Lynn imagines Dime responding by saying they are doing a great job creating new terrorists. This on-the-nose explanation of what Lee thinks of war is grating and thoroughly unpleasant to experience. For a director capable of great works, it is a shame to see him forget the basic tenant of screenwriting "show and do not tell". By ignoring this advice, you wind up with Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.
This is further preached at us through Norm Oglesby (Martin). The soldiers are working with Albert (Chris Tucker) to get a movie made about them, but they only have the length of the game to get a deal done (I have no idea why). After initially telling them that Hilary Swank wanted to play Billy Lynn in the movie - which is an offensive joke that finds comedy by mocking transsexuality, again shocking from Lee who made Brokeback Mountain - the deals all fall through. Only left is Oglesby who offers the soldiers $5,500 a piece plus a percentage of the profits for the deal. He then explains to Billy that their story is America's not their own. Naturally, the script has Billy put him in his place and explain that it is their lives and they actually live these events. In the bathroom immediately after, Albert comes in and exclaims that it was like something out of a movie. Hysterical, annoyingly self-aware, and a further example of Lee pummeling the audience with his own personal beliefs and what he wants us to all get out of this film.
As with any awful script, the film is not without horrific dialogue. When not preaching at us, the script still feels inauthentic. It never stops feeling written and it borders on comedy at times. The scenarios they find themselves in - fighting security, fighting an obnoxiously **** guy in the crowd - never feel natural. It all feels so staged and pre-planned. This is a film that never feels real. It consistently feels like it is a movie and goes to great lengths to remind us that it is a film, not just with the interaction in the bathroom with Albert either. While watching the game, Billy shows Albert the cheerleader he made out with earlier, Faison (Makenzie Leigh). Remarking that all great movies have a love story, Lee sets us up for more awful dialogue in the form of this half-baked romance.
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A rare failure by beloved Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is also one of the year's strangest films in regard to craft and release. The story and theme are simple, though: the title character (Joe Alwyn) is a suburban Texan who enlists in the U.S. Army as a teenager and serves in Iraq. After an image of him tending to a severely wounded superior (Vin Diesel) becomes popular online, he is sent on a promotional tour to wave the flag and pacify an anxious public. The tour culminates in he and his surviving squad members' ornamental participation in a Destiny's Child halftime show at a Dallas football game. The majority of the action unfolds within the stadium. Similar to Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, a chief aim here is to compare and contrast a soldier's hard-fought understanding of bravery and sacrifice with the easily digestible embellishments and myths presented to the public. Alas, Lee's satire is devoid of venom, and any potential dramatic resonance is undercut by overwrought, at times absurdly platitudinous dialogue; a claustrophobic framing device; and a host of out-of-sync actors, none of whom truly inhabit their characters. As Lynn, British newcomer Alwyn does not exhibit much of interest beyond photogenic blue eyes, registering as vacant rather than tortured, and poor Steve Martin delivers perhaps a career-worst performance as the stadium's unctuous neoconservative owner. These notable shortcomings in regard to acting, pacing, and tone are compounded tenfold by Lee's dramatic decision to film every scene in purportedly hyper-detailed, game-changing 120-frames-per-second 3-D. (Footage so vivid, the viewer can count the pores on Martin's face.) It is hard for a director to change the game, though, when his skeptical distributor outfits only four or five cinemas to project the film as he intended. I saw the final product in standard 2-D, as will ninety-nine-point-nine percent of others. Left-field creative choices presumably intended to enhance the sense of three-dimensional immersion, most notably nauseating closeups of actors delivering their dialogue directly to the camera, no longer have context and are distracting at best, ugly at worst. This minor and spasmodic melodrama, reminiscent of the uneven first wave of war-on-terror parables and treatises (Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition), certainly does not benefit from this half-realized and inappropriate technical flamboyance.
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Awards
Satellite Awards
• 4 Nominations
Hollywood Film Awards
• 2 Wins & 2 Nominations
Golden Trailer Awards
• 1 Nomination
