Waste of time

hyped garbage

The first must-see film of the year.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This impressive documentary is deserving of an Oscar nomination. What caught my eye is the word "Aleppo," the Syrian city that's been under attack by numerous people ever since. Maybe the fact this documentary is about the Syrian civil war got me watching this documentary on Netflix first (It has 2 other feature documentaries available to view.) could assure the Oscar win. "Last Men In Aleppo" follows some Syrian rescue workers identified as "White Helmets" & showcases these men as humans--husbands and fathers taking care of their families but also saving living citizens & recovering the dead, both caught in the bombing of the city. Also the rescue workers struggle with the conflict of leaving Syria to find better lives for themselves & their families. As an American safely observing the Syrian warfare on the news, I cannot take for granted my own country & my liberties & privileges as the White Helmets of Aleppo see death & war as a regular part of their lives.

90 people died in April 2017 when sarin gas projectiles were fired into Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the Idlib province of north-western Syria. of course Russia again used its veto to end an investigation of Syria chemical attacks. more than 1100 children are now suffering from acute malnutrition in the - since 2013 - besieged rebel-held eastern Ghouta where up to 400,000 people are believed to live in one of the last remaining opposition strongholds in Syria. their fate will be grimmer than those in Aleppo where Assad and Putin managed to slaughter thousands.cholera is spreading incredibly fast in Yemen, turning an already dire situation for children into an enormous disaster in the war that is mostly forgotten in the international media. and in Myanmar at the very moment (October 2017) about 600,000 Rohingyas have fled their homes for safety in Bangladesh after a genocide carried out by Myanmar military. survivors have reported summary executions, rape and the wholesale destruction of villages. land mines now line the road out of Myanmar causing even more deaths...the list of the ongoing hells in our world is endless. Aleppo is not over - not even in Aleppo itself where there are still countless bodies rotting in the ruins and many rescue workers and other inhabitants now in Assad's hellholes of prisons where they are daily tortured and then executed. the document in itself is as shocking and repulsive as you might expect but then it is shocking and repulsive at least for a normal human being to see dead babies and children covered in dust being dug up from devastated buildings and crumbled concrete. the document shot in hand-held camera is quite similar to "ambulance/Gaza" by Mohamed Jabaly (2016) which also focused on the desperate work of the rescue crew during the Israelian massacre of July 2014 in Gaza. both are utterly important eyewitness reports and both are sadly recommended.

Tough movie to watch. Tougher to read the reviews of dumb conspiracy theorists who think George Soros can cause solar eclipses and the such. It's actually a remarkably unpolitical film, but follows the day by day lives of firemen in Aleppo. It's pretty tragic, but the humanity of the people in Syria shine through.

"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'" Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five Call it what you will, Syria's President Assad's pummeling his people with the aid of Russian bombers is genocide plain and simple. You do not want to see the blunt documentary Last Men in Aleppo if you support Assad or can't stomach The White Helmets pulling dead babies from rubble.What you will see, however, is a first-rate rendering from the streets of Helmet heroic citizens risking their lives to save the victims of the destruction. The doc concentrates on Khaled Omar, a founder of the Helmets, looking for people to save all the time staying in contact through cell with his family. On occasion he plays with the kids at an oasis of a playground.Therein lies the supreme irony of people trying to survive holocaust and trying to retain the dignities of normal life. As one Helmet says, "Should we sit down and cry or what?" Actually only the words of the survivors can get even close to understanding genocide in our own time, 250,000 Syrians dead since the purge began in 2011.Although Khaled and his crew save adults as well, the children are the starkest notion of cruelty on a mass basis and the loss of future for everyone, as Khaled says profoundly and prophetically, "The dilemma is the children." Despite the discursive narration and exposition that seem to randomly course among the ruins, the cumulative effect of sorrow and brief joy is to give us an unforgettable documentary experience, even if we go back to our democratic safety zones, creating a few potholes on an airstrip while the city burns."The horror! The horror!" Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness