I went to an afternoon matinée of Indiana Jones and was pleasantly surprised to see a full trailer for Passchendaele before the feature. There have been some threads on Paul Gross' movie on this board before; basically he is telling a fictionalized story of his grandfather, who served in the 10th Battalion. The movie follows Sergeant Dunne through 2nd Ypres (possibly only in flashback) and back to Calgary where he falls in love, then back to France to watch over a family member who goes off with the 10th into 3rd Ypres (Passchendaele) in 1917.
Uniform buffs will like the level of detail - in addition to C-over-10 badges, the trailer shows some good shots of the red battle patches being correctly worn, in addition to officers wearing proper bronzed cap and collar badges with white metal overlays. Gross, as his grandfather Dunne, also wears blue shoulder straps, the mark of one of the 1914 originals.
Obviously, uniform details don't translate into effective plot and story, and I am sure the military community will have all kinds of whining about "needless love stories", but as someone who likes girls, I will not be one of those pedantic few criticizing the movie before I've even seen it. Ninety minutes of grappling in the mud without some kind of underlying story would be deadly dull and I think Gross, from what I've heard of the plot, has picked a good story that will hopefully appeal to a wide spectrum of people. If any Canadian has the star power to draw people in to a movie about grappling in the mud, I think it would be him.
I'm looking forward to this, having talked to a couple of the military advisors and seen the level of research they put into it. A couple of those collar badges in the movie may have been mine as I loaned a pair of castings for the production crew to use as samples, for which I was handsomely rewarded - any re-enactor or other hobbyist would love to have Hollywood's deep pockets, I think.
The trailer is well done, so get your popcorn early when you go to see Indy and be seated by the time the trailers roll. Don't know if this trailer is playing everywhere, or for how long. I presume the film will be premiering in November for Remembrance Day but honestly don't know if that is still the plan.
http://www.passchendaelethemovie.com/movie/indexload.html
The movie's website has the trailer online, in addition to many photos from the set, some letters which I presume are from the actual Michael Dunne (hard to tell, really, and it's not explicitly stated) read aloud by Gross, and other information that is quite interesting and well put together. Lots of behind the scenes video clips and things.