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I just finished watching A Bridge Too Far on Tubi last night. What a ride. I’m sure I had seen it in parts years ago, but I never saw the entire thing, uncut and fully realized.
As some of you know, I’ve been a filmmaker for nearly thirty years now and I absolutely love movies. But what I found wild about this one is that you could never make it again the way they did. It is incredible. The sets, the extras, the tanks! Man, how many flipping tanks are in this film? And they are real.
There is no CGI and very few VFX—if any—in this entire picture. Wrestling with mechanical film cameras and analog stock today makes you realize just how mind-blowing the physical logistics of this production really were. One of the most surprising sequences—and they do it twice—is when the paratroopers drop into Holland. They film an entire mission from loading the plane, all through the drop, right until they hit the ground. (Saving Private Ryan ripped off this film pretty damn good, by the way.) It was also the obvious reference for those same sequences in Band of Brothers.
But what is truly wild is they strap a heavy, physical camera to a paratrooper, and he leaps out of the plane and films the entire jump. They do this multiple times. It’s wild, and it actually made me feel the jump. It was way better than the Band of Brothers jumps that felt like mini dream sequences... well, except the parts where the planes blow up. Anyway.
The sets themselves are incredibly impressive and are completly destroyed by the end of the film. Again, it looks like they destroy a real town.
One other nightmare sequence is the troopers crossing the river in the folding boats. The 82nd Airborne is sent on a suicide mission to take the other end of the bridge. The sheer dread of that tactical reality hits a lot harder when you've carried an Army rucksack yourself. They get delayed so long that they have to execute a river assault at 1 in the afternoon! So in broad daylight they paddle—fore real, mind you—across this river while the stunt men get blown up in the boats behind Robert Redford. Insane!
It’s all real. This movie has a great onsamble cast and tackles the true story of Market Garden (if you know, you know), literally recreating it on an epic scale. Check it out.
What Was It?A Bridge Too Far is based on a real event from World War II called Operation Market Garden. It happened in September 1944.
The Big PlanThe good guys (the Allies) wanted to end the war fast so everyone could go home by Christmas. They came up with a very bold plan. They decided to drop thousands of soldiers out of airplanes using parachutes. These soldiers were supposed to land in a country called Holland (the Netherlands) and capture several important bridges.
At the same time, friendly tanks were supposed to drive up a single road, cross all those captured bridges, and sneak right into Germany to win the war.
What Went Wrong?It was a great idea, but almost everything went wrong.
The soldiers fought very hard and captured most of the bridges. But the very last bridge, in a town called Arnhem, was simply too far away for the tanks to reach in time. Because they couldn't keep that last bridge, the plan failed, and the war kept going for another eight months.
