Our World War on BBC3 - My Thoughts so Far

With the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 in full swing our TV's are full of documentaries and dramas about the war at the moment, and most of them are really well put together. The one that I've been enjoying the most is Our World War on BBC3, the channel choice being a bit unfortunate as it really is worthy to have a spot on BBC1 or 2 where it would get much higher ratings. The show runs for three episodes, two of which have been aired so far and follows a Band of Brothers style affair complete with a desaturated colour palette but does mix things up a bit with overhead tactical maps showing the bigger picture, all set on the frontlines of the biggest battles of the war and all the characters are based on actual people who were there.

The first episode was extremely well done, minus an obnoxious camera choice of putting in almost GoPro style shots following the runner going back and forth to HQ and some weird shots where it seemed that the camera had been strapped the the end of characters rifles. These were forgivable though as the rest of the episode followed a well done, events based telling of the first battle of the BEF in France, and didn't dwell on individual characters for too long, switching perspective between about 5 different people throughout the course of the episode, whilst still making us care about every single one of them. The tension leading up to the action scene builds up perfectly for edge of your seat action. Overall, the first episode made for immerse viewing where you can just sit back, get lost in the battle scenes and not question what was appearing on screen, everything made sense and wasn't cliched or too overly dramatic. One of the rather cute things from a production standpoint though was the costume department apparently didn't want any of the British uniforms damaged, and so bullets miraculously miss uniforms and some characters don't have access to their tunics during the battle scenes. Saying that though, that sentence could be considered a spoiler. Obviously the BBC has a lot more WW1 productions coming up that they need the uniforms for, so we have those look to forward to.

With episode one being so good, I was really looking forward to the second one, advertised as being about PALs Battalions at the battle of the Somme. This premise had a lot of promise, having recently watched the film The Trench that had also been shown on the BBC I was expecting a similar sort of plot. A bit of a spoiler here for the film, The Trench follows a platoon of PALs sent to the trenches in the week before the opening day of the battle of the Somme and later find themselves in the first wave going over the top. It's more of a depiction of trench life than the battle of the Somme, but it's the same formula that I was expecting from the second episode of Our World War. But Our World War takes a completely different plot line to a conventional story about this time, this could of been a good thing, but the execution of the episode seemed altogether off. Starting the action in France on the first day rather than spending more time in the run up, what should have been a centerpiece to the episode seemed rushed and small scale. This wouldn't have bothered me that much if the rest of the episode was linearly told, but it was plagued with flash forwards and flash backs that broke up the immersion of the episode and slowed it right down in places. Modern music appeared a few times at the beginning of the episode, maybe intentioned as a "look, these guys are just like us!" attempt, but it's a big immersion breaker. This was also present in the first episode, but I either didn't notice or was too engrossed in the story to care about it. The episode focused on only one man, and so the rest of the characters seemed a bit distant compared to those in the first episode and so their deaths didn't have the impact that they should have. For a more character based episode, focusing on the emotional aspects of war and the friendship of the PALs this is a major problem, not enough time is spent addressing this other than in almost direct exposition. The whole drama of the firing squad plot, while well intentioned appeared to me to be detrimental to the rest of the story as the issue is built up to so much and is resolved too quickly, this is the main focus of the flash forward scenes and it mostly feels like filler. While the whole story is based around fact and so you can't change the story much, there are much better ways to present a story like this.

This whole thing sounds really negative, and the episode isn't bad, it's perfectly watchable and very interesting for the most part, but it fails to live up to the expectation that I came away with after watching the first episode. If the flash forward sections were taken out the rest would be fantastic, but it's this breakup of tension caused by these scenes that spoils it. An interactive episode is also available online and runs for about 15 minutes, with branching choices that effects the rest of the episode. It's a nice addition and a very interesting watch, even if it isn't a true story like the rest. The third episode, showing this Thursday takes place during the battle of Amiens, following a tank crew and appears to include a functioning tank, probably the Bovington Tank Museum tank made up for the War Horse film. Hopefully this will bring the episode back in line with the first episode and make it a gripping events based story of the battle. I'll probably write up another post on that episode after it comes out.

Both the first and second episode are currently available on BBC iPlayer and will be for the next 11 days.