Blood of Eagles is the second in what looks to be a trilogy of action movies documenting a couple soldiers fighting Indonesia's war of independence against the Dutch in 1947. Its predecessor, Red and White, was one of the most successful Indonesian films ever produced and Blood of Eagles looks to capture the same audience with a mix of action, drama, romance and humor.
Thankfully, the director and producer were on hand to discuss the previous film before we got started with Blood of Eagles, because nothing's really spelled out for the audience in the film's opening act. It's assumed you're familiar with the freedom fighters and their respective women, who must have been captured at the close of the first film. Blood of Eagles begins with a rescue mission and ends with a plot to destroy a pivotal Dutch airfield.
Blood of Eagles is very reminiscent of old WWII films like A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day. It features big explosions, loads of chatter between comrades and some pretty standard villains. Although the lush greens of Indonesia look great on the big screen, the scale of warfare here has been reduced: most of the combat is between only a few soldiers at a time. This suits the film well, though, as it never pretends to be about the war as a whole, just about a small band of men.
Unfortunately, Blood of Eagles is really poorly written. The dialogue is often cringe-worthy. The final third of the film, which takes place at the targeted airfield, is rife with awful one-liners and overbearing musical scoring. The strings swell, the use of slow-motion kicks in out of nowhere and suddenly the film becomes just like any other below-average war movie. It simply becomes another heartless action movie. There's no truth in it.
Blood of Eagles is fun for what it is: a Hollywood-esque portrayal of a forgotten war. But the second half of the movie rings so false that the drama loses its power and falls flat on its face. Some of this film works; most of it doesn't.
