Miracle at St. Anna

I recently saw the movie Miracle at St. Anna and then looked it up on the internet. I was surprised to find that it had so many negative reviews. I found it to be pretty good. The film is about four black soldiers of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division who get trapped near a small Tuscan village during the Italian Campaign of World War II after one of them risks his life to save an Italian boy.

Though the massacre shown in the film, Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre, actually did happen, 560 people killed. The film is fictional not a documentary and should be treated as a fictional story. I'd make some type of comment about the real massacre but I don't really know much about it. I know it happened and some of the German's involved were or are recently being put on trial. Those that are still alive are in their 80's. It's very sad that a massacre of 560 people is mostly a foot note of the world wars. There were so many atrocities done by every side that it would be difficult to even list them all.

The acting by the large black guy with the name of Train (nicknamed sniper bait) and the child, Angelo (their in movie names - don't know/too lazy to look up real names), was the best acting in the film. My favorite scene from the movie is when the child first meets Train and calls him Chocolate Giant then licks him.

The movie was long, which doesn't bother me in the least, but I feel that the movie would have been better had some scenes been cut or truncated. In particular the first scene and the ending scene. The scenes weren't really that bad but they add little to the movie and the first one really doesn't make sense. Sure the soldier killing the traitor looked cool (the way he goes about it and then calmly closes up is pretty damn awesome) but it is too much of a coincidence that the traitor would happen to go to that post office, that particular window, and most of all that the postman would recognize him and have German gun (souvenir) from World War 2 on him at the time.