People are voting emotionally.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This documentary series' strong point is the use of only WWII footage, often colorized. A lot of it is rarely seen in other documentaries, some of it none at all. So it's very interesting in that perspective.However, it's a French documentary and it's very French-centric and usually very biased. On several occasions I've caught it omitting important information/context or bringing up wrong information. For a documentary claiming to cover the whole of WW2 (which it does claim to do so), it's not a very good effort. It will mention several side-topics that are important for France (e.g. the politics of France before the war), but doesn't bother with important parts of WW2 that France had nothing to do with, e.g. the war in the Balkans.Most egregious is that it tries very heavily to paint the Soviets as bad or worse than the Nazis. It tries to paint Britain as the major obstacle to Germany and their main opponent. Just to be clear, ideally it shouldn't be biased at all for either side. It should be presenting history and commentary on the footage. Instead it sometimes uses footage to present a version of history that is favorable to the makers.Still, in the parts that concern Western Europe, it does a very good job on educating its viewers on important details that are not known by many. It gives a very good perspective of the civilian population. The footage taking a primary role, instead of a tool to transition between interview scenes (this documentary doesn't have any such scenes) keeps things interesting.I'd recommend watching it, but bearing in mind that it only does the rudimentary minimum for anything else aside from French and British affairs. As far as the Eastern Front goes and the War in the Pacific, you can find many better documentaries.

Six 45-minute episodes does no justice to what was truly the most devastating Apocalypse in human history. But yes this is pretty good given the very limiting length constraint.I am writing this review however, mostly so I can rant about the disproportionate amount of time devoted (in this already extremely short documentary) to what the French did. France is often caricatured as having, in WW2, done little more than surrender immediately, ship out Jews while waiting to be liberated, and be forever angry at their liberators (especially for speaking English while in France). This caricature is however probably closer to the truth than what this documentary suggests. Example: one bit talked at length about the mythical French Resistance, then went on to show 3-second clips of resistance movements around the continent, e.g. in Yugoslavia, Norway, etc. This was quite risible, given that the Yugoslav Resistance successfully liberated Yugoslavia by themselves, while Albert Speer replied "What French Resistance?" when asked about it.Example: The French Resistance and De Gaulle are depicted as having liberated Paris, but really they were (for lack of a common English expression) ribbon-cutters claiming the credit for work done by their true liberators---the English-speakers. An astonishing fact cited by Andrew Roberts in The Storm of War is this: A greater number of Frenchmen bore arms for the Axis than for the Allies. A French schoolchild who watches this documentary will however get the wrong impression that France was nearly equal to Britain or even the US/USSR in the struggle against the Nazis.

Maybe the story is not 100% complete, and maybe it gets a little confusing because so many things happen simultaneously throughout the world, so it's understandable that they didn't cover every single aspect and that it's a little too much "French biased", after all it is a French documentary. For example they didn't cover the Balkans at all, and there was one of the most complicated situations in the whole WW2. Maybe not the most important, but certainly interesting, especially in Yugoslavia, where there was in effect a three-way civil war under Nazi occupation, between royalists, communists and quislings going on simultaneously with the armed resistance to Nazis. So that in itself is a situation that would require it's own documentary, and I can see that the authors maybe did not wan't to get into explaining those difficult circumstances when it may take too much time. But the sheer amount of film material shown, that I've never seen before, is astonishing to say the least. I watched every episode eyes wide open. And it's that WW2 video material itself that makes this documentary worth having in one's collection.

I watched this six-part documentary series when it was first shown on British television back in November 2010. I was absolutely blown away by it.The main draw of this French-made series is the inclusion of colour film footage. The narration doesn't really tell us anything we don't already know about the war, but the colour footage, which plays constantly throughout the six hours, is tremendous and brings the era to life like never before.Fairly wide-ranging in scope, this one covers the Nazi invasions, the Russian front, the British perspective and the War in the Pacific. I was moved, intrigued and came away feeling like I'd attended an extremely good history class on the subject.