Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The movie is long. It repeats too much. To see how it affects the character, you do not need to see it so many times. It is a film that if it were shorter would win many points.The actors are very good, but Harrelson is a very good actor, that is not discovering anything new.At least, do not waste time in sex, that's to be grateful. It does well. No need to see what to know what will happen.Photography does not help much. It is not a pretty photograph. It is austere without more.The director, directs characters, but does not see that there is a film left. The plans are basic. It does not place the camera well. He does not know how to narrate with her. It does not bore but it stagnates.It lets itself be seen.

Well this was a nice surprise. I didn't think much to the logline but it misses the key setup detail in that this is a film about the "messengers" who have to tell the next of kin that their family member died at war. It's a fascinating concept and these types of characters have never had their due as even supporting roles. Not only is this film incredibly powerful, but it's funny, compassionate and thrilling. It has everything in just the right measure, always doing something in a unique way and rewarding the audience with information about the characters. It's the scenes of the actual "messaging" shot in one long take, which are clearly actors playgrounds, that hit hard. The film hits every beat right on time without feeling constrained by structure. The only problem I had was that I wish the photography was more consistent, as sometimes it has fantastic iconography, but sometimes it feels unplanned and out of place, especially with the infrequent zooms. Fortunately the acting (and sometimes the great soundtrack) saves it. Brilliant storytelling, brilliant filmmaking. This is how modern films should be written and how I want to make films. Loved it.9/10

"The Messenger" is an emotionally captivating story. From the very beginning, the look of the film makes you question what the movie is really about. A bit slow in the beginning, the movie begins to wrap you up in curiosity and then takes you out into the troubles of what it is like for a soldier to re-acclimate him/herself to society after a tour of duty; all while serving the last few months of service in the Casualty Notification Team. We follow the main characters journey back into society and get a first hand view at the parallels that are often overlooked by people who are not in direct contact with military personnel. The characters are charming, down to earth, and completely relatable. You don't have to have served in the military to understand the struggles, both internal and external, that our protagonist faces. The supporting cast does a great job of portraying everyday folks who could be anyone and everyone. The dialogue and story, combined with simple, yet artistic camera work, make this story truly enthralling. "The Messenger" is a great film that everyone should watch.

Two-thirds into The Messenger, Woody Harrelson's grizzled Desert Storm veteran ironically puts his finger on part of the reason why Hollywood's Iraq war dramas have been such flops. As he tells Ben Foster's young, traumatised war hero, "In Vietnam, those guys got laid six ways from Sunday". Bosnia? "Best brothels in the world." But Iraq? "All that religious bulls**t – and nobody getting laid. That's half the reason everybody's so angry!" Crudely put, Iraq isn't sexy. Iraq is too recent, too raw, too alien and frankly too illegal for most cinema-goers to regard as entertainment. Even the prospect of Jason Bourne in Baghdad couldn't save Green Zone from scooping less than a handful of sand at the box office. And if The Hurt Locker proved the bankable exception, all it really proves is that people prefer their action movies as apolitical as possible. Actually, the best films being made right now about the wars in the middle-east are documentaries – which is also problematic, as American audiences usually look forward to those about as much as getting their feet blown off by an IED. As a US army private remarked in 2007, Iraq "is a reality show everybody's bored of." What The Messenger does is to bring the war back home again in a very literal and jolting way. Foster and Harrelson play emissaries for the Angel of Death. As a Casualty Notification team it is their hideous assignation to ring doorbells and unmake somebody's day. These soldiers may be deactivated from combat, but together they're as lethal as a pair of hollow points – one weathered and scratched, the other, freshly popped out of the mould, repeatedly strolling into zones packed with emotional time-bombs... and heavily pregnant girlfriends. It's never anything other than absolutely horrible. And strangely, calls to mind Alan Clarke's short film Elephant – a succession of near-wordless sectarian executions in Northern Ireland. With their long, static takes, both pictures have a voyeuristic quality, but where Elephant is coolly dispassionate, The Messenger means to shake you like a rag doll, and does so.As a character study and dark sort of buddy movie, it works very well. There's something of the young Sean Penn about the excellent Foster, straining to reach out to the world, while the testosterone-squirting Harrelson, whose bald dome and beady eye makes him look even more like a walking erection, personifies the confluence between lust and war with every utterance: "I'd like to strap her on and wear her like a government-issue gas mask" he notes of a passing barmaid.If there's a certain over-familiarity about its scenes of men hurting themselves in small rooms to speed metal soundtracks, or limping dazedly around supermarket aisles longer and wider than Death Valley, well, perhaps that's unavoidable: this is now cinema's official depiction of PTSD. The film does lose focus after Foster ignores procedure ("Don't touch the N.O.Ks!") and falls for Samantha Morton's army widow – a beautifully understated performance, despite having to parrot such clunky Oscar-bait as "His shirt smelled of rage and fear. It smelled of the man he had become, over there. You know?" In his 1959 novel The Tin Drum, Günter Grass conjures up a swanky post-war nightspot called The Onion Cellar, where emotionally constipated Germans pay through the nose to perch on crates and ritually slice onions until they're swimming in crocodile tears. Back then, Grass was satirising Germany's inability to grieve following its numbing defeat. Today, Hollywood is harvesting onions as fast as it can – yet the more onions it lobs at audiences, the more audiences duck. Perhaps years from now, a drama will be made that perfectly articulates the Allied experience of Iraq, as The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now did with Vietnam. The Messenger isn't that film, but it's among the better ones.