After the War (1989) User Reviews

Good but far from great epic story of misery and wits

[JonathanWalford · 6/10 · 25 January 2007]

After The War starts off with lots of promise: clever dialog, intriguing storyline, and fascinating character development. The second of the ten episodes is by far the best of the whole series. The problem is the story has too many red herrings, tangents, and meandering story lines. There is an attempt to tie everything up neatly at the end but by the time you get there you are sick of hearing the whiny characters mope and whine about how horrible their lives are. It seems nobody is happy about anything and its everyone else's fault. In real life, many of the characters in the film would not be tolerated for any length of time. However, in this film everyone likes to use their friends and family as a whetstone to sharpen their wits. The writing is clever -- too clever for real dialog. The lines are too glib for conversation and yet the romantic scenes are almost laughably clumsy and simplistic with first meetings regularly turning into wedding proposals. The script desperately needed cleaning up and the story should have been edited and simplified. Its nearly impossible to remember everyone's names from one episode to the next. I gave this a 6 out of 10 mostly on the strength of the first two episodes and the promise of the writer to do better in the future.