Date Watched: July 24, 2010
Source: Netflix Instant Play
This film is a beautiful horror. I’m sure when most people think of WWII, they mostly think of the Holocaust. But so many others paid with their lives as well. Miracle at St. Anna follows the Buffalo Soldiers, an entirely African-American division of the Army. These guys fought for a country that hated them, in a country that hated them, in a branch of the military that didn’t recognize them as their own men. This particular group of Buffalo Soldiers, the 92nd, were in Tuscany. They weren’t all trained or armed appropriately, and when they were ignored by their commanding officer for air support, all but four of them were wiped out. One of them, a big-hearted, God-loving giant, stumbled upon a little boy who’d been crushed by a blast in a ramshackle barn. The boy spoke no English, and the soldier, known as Train, spoke no Italian, but he took the boy under his wing and protected him as his own son. He found a way to communicate with him, and he did everything he could to nurse the boy back to health.
The dynamic between the four soldiers, the Italian villagers who help them, their racist and idiotic commanding officer, is incredibly well written and portrayed on screen. I am hesitant to say much else, but I will say that while the beginning, current day scenes are extremely powerful, they are no match to the explanation throughout the rest of the movie. It is, like I said, simply a beautiful horror.
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