EAGLES ATTACK AT DAWN is a watchable P.O.W. rescue movie, similar in many respects to UNCOMMON VALOR. I bought this video thinking it was yet another version of the true life story of Entebbe rescue mission. Instead I got a fictional account of something similar. A daring rescue on foreign soil by I.D.F. commandos. I love Israeli films, they are always low budget but are also always full of great energy. The villains and the heroes are all interesting to watch in this one, the locations are good, but the transfer I saw was pretty sad, washed out color generally grainy and muddy sound. Seeing as its not particularily outstanding in any area its unlikely to garner a fresh or remastered transfer to DVD. A couple of interesting points in its favor, the indoor gunfights are especially well staged and executed "first person shooter" PC game designers would do well to watch this film just for that. While watching I found myself thinking, "boy that's a great choke point scene, someone should do a map of this for Return To Castle Wolfenstein!". Also of note, this is an ENGLISH language production, so there are no badly translated subtitles to worry about. Kudos to the Golan/Globus team for this decent "B" title.
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jessewillis14 August 2003
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cdelacroix123 June 2007I just saw this flick on DVD. I generally agree with Jessewillis' comments, and won't repeat them here, but would like to add a few more comments regarding some special features that to me added to the value of this movie.
First, POW escape films in general, for Americans, tend to have such a very different geographical scope. An escape from a German prison in WWII, for example, will feature (say) American or British soldiers who seek to escape from Stalag X and seek repatriation across hundreds of miles to get back to (typically) Britain. In contrast, this movie, filmed on location in Israel, gives us a very different sense of geography and terrain. The notorious prison is within 20 or 30 miles (I can't recall which) from the Israeli border. It's a rough escape trek, but it's not far, and when the escapees suddenly spot the sea, and know they've made it, we get such a strong sense of the closeness and proximity of things in Israel and Palestine. Likewise, the dry, sparse, craggy terrain around the prison is (of course) the same as the dry, sparse, craggy terrain just over the border in Israel. So the escapees aren't getting that far away, and aren't spotting the White Cliffs of Dover on the other side of the Manche, but the sea that is itself the other side of Israel. The closeness of things comes across to me very, very strongly in this film, and gives a very different flavor to an escape film from those I'm used to.
Second, there's a strong sense of time and antiquity side-by-side with the vivid here-and-now. The prison is located within strong but crumbling walls that we are told date back either to the time of Christ or the time of Mohammed. This dry, rocky, hard earth stretched out under wide open skies is, we sense, not so much different from the land through the centuries. And when Valentino dies during the Escape, just before the escapees reach Israel, Beno (I think it was?) states strongly that they will somehow bear the body back to Israel, for he will be buried in Israel. We get a strong sense of the "eretz", the land that has been there almost from before time, and which remains the "eretz" today.
Third, there's a strong sense of ethno-religious distinctions that in the West we're just not really familiar with in our Escape movies. The Germans and the Americans and the English actually all share a common ethno-religious heritage; it is national differences that are in play in the conflicts in WWII and the like. In contrast, while national identity is a part of this Israeli film, so is the ethnic and the religious identity of the parties. I've already noted that time and dates are regarded in religious history terms: the fort dates to the time of Christ or the time of Mohammed. Religious allusions abound throughout. So do conjoined ethnic allusions. The Arabs are Muslim; the Israelis are Jewish. This certainly makes for some potentially treacherous ground in film-making, since we have all of the Arabs being the Bad Guys and all of the Israeli's being the Good Guys. But there are some interesting nuances that would be more familiar in the Middle East perhaps than in America: hence a guard helps Eli, and we discover that the guard is not Arab / Muslim of a "conventional" kind, anyway, but he is Druze. The Druze are a distinctive ethno-religious community which often found common interest with the Israelis in southern Lebanon and in Golan. But again, the point is that adding strong ethno-religious distinctions to the national distinctions involved in the conflict setting of this movie really adds a different "flavor" to this POW escape movie.
All in all, I liked this movie, not only because it makes for a great B-movie of the POW escape / action genre, but also because it offers such a strong and distinctive experiential flavor that is "different" for me, anyway, as a resident of the continental USA.
This is really good, solid POW flick with delightfully exceptional experiential features & flavors, and if you like this kind of thing, as I certainly do, I strongly recommend this movie to your viewing pleasure. -
Dhawley-219 January 2005This movie, one of 8 films in a budget DVD set of 'classic' war films (yeah, right) that I bought, seemed to be promising enough for me to invest 90 minutes of viewing time. Unfortunately, there was precious little return on my time investment. The film begins with one of several Israeli commandos escaping from a notorious prison in some unnamed Arab country, which "borders Israel." The escapee makes it back to Israel, convalesces from his wounds, and quickly pulls together another group of commandos to rescue his comrades. A simple premise, but producer/director Menachem Golan manages to turn a promising action film into a disjointed and illogical mess. To begin with, there is no explanation given for why the commandos were in another country, nor what they were doing there. The implication is that they were spies, yet the audience is (apparently) supposed to accept these plug-ugly, unsympathetic characters as the 'good guys'. The main bad guy (the Arab prison director) is a cartoon-like character who bears a marked resemblance to former Egyptian president Sadat (there is a scene where a picture of former Egyptian president Nassar is seen on Bad Guy's desk). Things get more confusing with the arrival of ex TV soap opera regular Peter Brown, playing an American journalist doing a story on the infamous prison. Seems he's really a collaborator in the rescue effort, although none of the Israelis know him. The rest of the film deals with the rescue itself, with the requisite gun battles, explosions, etc, and the ultimate rescue. While the acting is okay, the film was poorly edited. It seems that whole segments of footage must have been cut out, resulting in a disjointed result. The interior scenes are so dark as to be nearly unwatchable, although the outdoor scenes look good. The gun battles, etc. are pedestrian at best, and the movie's characters are shallow, seeming to be almost caricatures (the stoic, downtrodden Israelis, the idealistic American supporter, the dastardly Arab military leader, etc.). The film came across to me as more of an Israeli propaganda exercise than anything. It might appeal to 17-year old Israeli males, or to other viewers with low expectations. While I have certainly seen worse films, overall this is a pretty weak excuse for a movie.