Good concept, poorly executed.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Excellent but underrated film

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I just love it, when at the end of the movie Arthur is kneeled down on his wife's tomb, weeps and almost cries, promises his wife to "always love her", and places red roses on her grave... sporting a $ 20 gold-and-steel quartz watch!!! All of this in 1916???Other than that, sorry to see again a heartless, stone-faced, stereotyped Grrman officer, whose only task is to kill and to see how the mama-loved Irish soldier is used as a sacrificial lamb to make a boring movie. Yawn!

This is a very well done World War I picture. But it also is a complete downer. The first war was a bloody and stupid affair with thousands upon thousands of senseless and needless deaths. But that doesn't mean the movie has to be as grim as the war. There are no moments of dramatic relief, no lighter moments. Even the flashbacks to home are dark and morose. In essence this is a straightforward story of three British soldiers, commanded by a snobbish officer-twit, who become stranded in no man's land. Nothing very original there. However the staging and the photography are grimly effective and capture the utter horror of the trenches. But I question why one of the three stranded British soldiers speaks like an American. And why did the Aussies put so much effort into a film about the "pommies" when it would have been just as effective if the soldiers had been Australian.

I don't remember the last time I watched a movie as bad as this. The action sequences are poor. There was no bond between the audience and the actors. I didn't much care which ones lived and which ones died. From the beginning to the end, the accents were terrible (especially the Irish accent - although I knew there was something off with the others too). I should have read the IMDb info before watching this movie and then I would have figured out that it was an Aussie movie with no Irish or English actors in this production. Anyway, Im not going to waste any more time on this movie. Its 1hr 40mins of my life that I wont ever get back again. A total waste of time. I was Bored to death.

Forbidden Ground is an Australian-made rendition of the plight of British soldiers trapped in no-man's land, and should have been the war epic it was (once) anticipated to be. The unfortunate truth is that it falls short of all expectations, and as a patriotic Australian I take no pleasure in saying it. From the first moments the small budget is apparent. Close-ups try and disguise the limited scale of the production. The battles in the film are all no more than small skirmishes and never really produced with any flair, impact, or suspense. The constant reliance on CGI for special effects cripples the action, unlike it's predecessor Beneath Hill 60 - which it will surely be compared to - which used mostly practical visual effects and captures gritty violence effectively. As such, when the horror of trench warfare comes along in this film, it is woefully un- engaging, and downright boring in parts. I felt no connection with the men going to their deaths. The obvious computer-generated explosions and squibs left a lot to be desired and had no "punch." It's an anti-war film, as most WWI films are, so you would expect a focus on correctly portraying the shocking waste of war, but Forbidden Ground lacks the budget or know-how to do it properly. There are some tired clichés including snobby, arrogant officers and the hard-nosed NCO, and while historically accurate in some ways, Forbidden Ground doesn't cast the roles with conviction, simply recycling scenes and minor characters from a dozen better war films. The other problem with authenticity is that most of the cast is Australian, and while our accents may be more or less similar and we often are mistaken for Poms, the actors on show here can't quite make it sound natural and every line feels laborious and forced. If they'd just spoken with their normal accents they would probably have sounded more comfortable with their characters, but alas every Pommy soldier on screen sounds like a caricature of British stereotypes. Another problem with authenticity is that the unit that is focused on seems to be an amalgamation of British accents. Whether intentional or by accident, units were formed from specific locales (universities, rugby clubs, towns, cities, etc) and would only occasionally be mixed with troops from broadly different locations (casualty replacements). So the end result is a disappointing straight-to-DVD war drama without any magnetism or flair. I praise the cast and crew for doing what they could to commemorate the war, but I can't recommend Forbidden Ground as good viewing. Better luck next time.