Movie Review: Land of Mine

Land of Mine *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Martin Zandvliet.

Written by: Martin Zandvliet.

Starring: Roland Møller (Sgt. Carl Rasmussen), Louis Hofmann (Sebastian Schumann), Joel Basman (Helmut Morbach), Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (Lt. Ebbe Jensen), Laura Bro (Karin), Zoe Zandvliet (Elisabeth, Karins Daughter), Mads Riisom (Soldier Peter), Oskar Bökelmann (Ludwig Haffke), Emil Belton (Ernst Lessner), Oskar Belton (Werner Lessner), Leon Seidel (Wilhelm Hahn).

 

The Danish film, Land of Mine, - an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at last year’s Oscars, is an odd film in that it takes place right at the end of WWII, and yet is more sympathetic to the German soldiers in the film, than the Danish ones. The film opens with a scenes of hundreds – or perhaps thousands – of German soldier marching out of Denmark back to Germany – as Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Roland Moller) watches from his jeep. He flies into a rage however when he sees one soldier holding a folded up Danish flag – he not only takes the flag from the soldier, he also beats him to a bloody pulp before sending him on his way. This is our introduction to Rasmussen – who will spend the rest of the movie supervising a group of 14 young (and I mean young) German soldiers, who are being forced to defuse the mines left behind by the Germans. Hitler was convinced the allied attack would come through the beaches in Denmark – because of their proximity to Berlin – so there is something like 2.2 million mines buried there. Rasmussen supervises his group as they take up one stretch of beach, which apparently has 45,000 mines in it – all buried 15-20 cm below the surface. Rasmussen tells them if they work hard, they can go home in three months when all the mines are defused. Of course, one wrong move by any of these young men, and they are likely dead.

 

Land of Mine is a tense movie in that you are never quite sure when a mine is going to explode. The young soldiers crawl on their bellies, with long metal rods that they use to stick into the sand and see if there is a mine there. If so, they dig it up, carefully, and defuse it. There are many way things can go wrong – and they pretty much all do at one point or another. At first, Rasmussen seems like the sadistic hothead he first appeared as in that opening scene – he is cruel to the Germans, and doesn’t seem to give it much thought. But gradually, he does soften. The Germans are not really being fed – but the movie makes it clear that the decision to do that comes above Rasmussen, who will eventually try and get them more food. The local farm – being run by a single mother and her small child – at first don’t seem to like the Germans any more than Rasmussen does – but they soften as well.

 

Land of Mine tells what is apparently not a well-known story in Danish history – and for good reason, as apparently forcing these young Germans to do what they do constitutes a war crime (I’m not sure how a country is supposed to diffuse millions of mines left behind by a former combatant, but it’s not that). The movie, smartly, never does show us a worse side of the Germans – there is only one of the soldiers who seems at all like he may be a true believer, but even he isn’t that bad. The soldiers are all young – like below the normal recruiting age, brought in by Hitler as the war was winding down, and it was clear they were going to lose, but they still needed soldiers to fight. They are being held responsible for the decisions and actions of others.

 

Gradually, Rasmussen becomes a more complex character than he first appeared to be. He very likely has many reasons to hate the Germans – and his anger is understandable. He is softened because he gradually begins to see the Germans as more than his enemy – he backslides once – but in the end he is more complicated than he first seemed.

 

Land of Mine isn’t a great film – it’s a little too straight forward, and it telegraphs its big moments too far in advance in too obvious of ways, and the end struck me as false. But it’s a good film – and a film that serves as a reminder that the good guys are not always perfect, and the bad guys not always evil – the people responsible usually don’t have to pay for their decisions.