Though they say that Hollywood has only three plots, if that is true, then that is three more than these unoriginal Streichers have.
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Although all the usual NATO outlets are proclaiming 2000 Meters to Andriivka to be the greatest (anti-) war documentary ever to hit the silver screen, my short analysis is going to put it into its historical perspective and allow the readers to make up their own minds about this latest piece of war pornography where director Mstyslav Chernov and Michelle Mizner, his Yankee sidekick, follow Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade “on their mission to liberate the village of Andriivka from Russian occupation”.
The first thing to say is that documentary makers, CIA propagandists if you prefer, have no right to accompany soldiers attacking a village that is being defended by crack Chechen troops who quite rightly are not going to discriminate between whatever fish or foul end up in their cross hairs. The only explanation for Chernov’s presence on the battlefield is his Andriivka effort is a follow up to his Academy award winning 20 Days In Mariupol, which we will now summarily dismiss as the war porn trash that it is.
When most readers here think of the Siege of Mariupol, they will instinctively think of the heavily tattooed Zelensky Nazis who finally surrendered in the Azovstal steel plant. But that steel plant is only fleetingly mentioned once, towards the end and on a Russian broadcast and, likewise the Azov battalion only get one fleeting mention, again towards the end and again by a Russian diplomat momentarily seen on a TV seemingly making hurried excuses for Russians unjustly attacking tooled up Nazis.
Most of the footage is taken from a multi story maternity hospital and, though the evacuated expectant mothers are tragic, equally worrying is Chernov’s crew pointing their cameras at Russian tank crews down below who, if they were jumpy, would have been fully justified in firing on them, all the more so as these charlatans later fled Mariupol disguised as medics in hospital scrubs, with all their cameras and footage, through over 100 miles of Russian occupied terrain as part of a humanitarian convoy of non-militants. Add in also its grating music and its dumb ass commentary and 20 Days in Mariupol should never have got anywhere near any awards, never mind the Oscars.
Not that 20 Days in Mariupol is our only weathervane. Michelle Mizner, Chernov’s producer, also produced Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: documenting war crimes, which was so dreadful that the ICC’s Karim Khan, whom MI6 later sent as an attack dog against Putin (and Maria Lvova-Belova ffs), told them to fuck off as recording crimes, war crimes, included, must be done by competent and impartial professionals, who do not taint evidence as these CIA funded propagandists with their sloppy editing, constant repetition, stupid background music and their adulation of Syria’s White Helmets murder gang incessantly do. And just like the fiction the White Helmets produce, so also have they Ukrainian “medics” running like headless chickens in all directions as they remove huge pieces of shrapnel that, according to a top Harley St surgeon friend of mine I consulted, would have killed anyone they were embedded into.
Instead of focussing on what might or might not have happened at Bucha’s 31 and 144 Yablunska Street. Mizner goes on a rant against Russia’s 76th Guards Air Assault Division and Russian General Aleksandr Chayko because he commanded Russian troops in Syria, where he was pictured with former Syrian leader Bashar Assad, who has absolutely nothing to do with the Ukrainian war in general and events in Bucha in particular. Given that PBS Frontline, which has ponied up the money for Chernov’s tripe, have been among the primary cheerleaders for ISIS in Syria since at least 2013, their need to shoehorn both Syria and Assad into Bucha and Andriivka should come as no surprise.
Although Mizner attacks the 76th Airborne Assault Division for the way they manhandled the spotters caught in 31 Yablunska Street, just about every Catholic of my generation in the north of Ireland got much worse from the British Army who, to their credit, knew how to duck patrol, something the Russkies did not bother with as they must not have felt under imminent threat. For me, the jury is still out on Bucha but then the Banderites, along with their PBS Frontline paymasters, are not big proponents of the impartial jury system.
Having demolished their resumes, now let us return to 2000 Meters to Andriivka to first of all critique it and then to put it in its cinematic context to fully bury it. The documentary/propaganda piece follows Freak, Fedya, Sheva and their mates as they inch ever closer to Andriivka, where Russian soldiers await to blast them to kingdom come. Although each and every one of those Ukrainian soldiers has a story, and one worth hearing, telling it is not Chernov’s game. He sees these pieces of cannon fodder, much like Hitler saw his sacrificial lambs at Stalingrad, as part of a holy project, as some sort of foundation blocks for a new and shining light on a hill, rather than as simple men, who should have led simple lives in the bosom of their friends and families far from where the mad guns roar and God damn him and all his fellow sectarians for abusing them and landing Ukraine in hell’s fires.
Of course, I am not the target audience for this garbage, which is aimed at those who never read a book or put their noses in harm’s way. This film is pure propaganda and as much a part of NATO’s 2023 Ukrainian counter-offensive, as were the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade and the other lemmings who partook in it. 2000 Meters to Andriivka is not so much an addition to the large portfolio of books, poems, movies and documentaries exploring war, as it is an insult to them.
There is none of the depth, balance and nuance of The World at War, Thames Television’s masterpiece on the Second World War but only the brain dead drum beats of the teacher and other parrots, who got Erich Maria Remarque and Siegfried Sassoon to join the wanton carnage of the Great War. 2000 Meters to Andriivka is nothing more than narrative convenience masquerading as realism, a genre we also see with the likes of Jeremy Scahill and other war porn peddlers, who hope to produce Hollywood’s next great thing and who are prepared to see countless innocents sacrificed if that furthers their own aims.
But let’s strip 2000 Meters to Andriivka down to its essentials to see if there is anything beneath the bonnet there. Though it tells the story of a group of brave men on an almost suicidal mission, wars are replete with such events, as they are with groups of men who find themselves in such predicaments, with Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier being an excellent exemplar in that regard. And, as regards bravery under fire, we can think of Das Boot or the exploits of Erich Hartmann, Michael Wittmann, the Brandenburger units or the German paratroopers at Monte Cassino as well as their earlier efforts (and those of their Dutch opponents) in the Battle of the Hague, and their subsequent stellar performance against all comers in the 1945 Battle for the Kapelsche Veer (aka Operation Elephant) to show Chernov offers nothing new on that side of the house in that regard.
If comparisons with Leni Riefenstahl and Bandera’s former German comrades in arms sound as partisan as Chernov’s own efforts, there are the Japanese, who produced pensive masterpieces such as The Human Condition, Fires on the Plain, Grave of the Fireflies, the Burmese Harp, Black Rain, the Last Samurai, the Eternal Zero, the Wind Rises and Yamato, to name but a few.
And, as we are in that neck of the woods, let’s throw in The Battle of Lake Chanjin, which was China’s biggest grossing film ever up to quite recently and, though it relies a tad too heavily on special effects, it tells the story of a Chinese military family, who get caught up in the Korean war (aka The Forgotten War) and, though it is rough at the edges, it does show that China is on a long march to cinematic perfection, even as NATO is reduced to the sort of propagandistic dross Chernov, Mizner, Scahill and their ilk churn out.
On the subject of Korea, here is an interview with James Thompson, who fought in Korea with the 24th Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit in the American Army, where he tells us that war is all about killing or being killed and, under no circumstances, to take any prisoners. Still on Korea, there is also the mega flop Inchon, which would be more up Chernov’s alley, not because it glorifies Shogun MacArthur but because it was a big-spend propaganda piece funded by the Moonies, which eventually doomed the high budget film to abject failure.
Or how about his viral interview with William Ehrhardt, a highly decorated USMC Vietnam veteran, who quickly learned that the game in Vietnam was, as Bruce Springsteen puts in, to kill the yellow man, very many of whom displayed outstanding feats of valour fighting for the North Vietnamese Army, the South Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong if the stories they and their relatives told me are anything to go by.
And here, by contrast, are damning interviews with the American soldiers of C Company 1/20 Infantry casually detailing how they raped, mutilated and massacred over 500 Vietnamese men, women and children in My Lai on 16 March 1968, war crimes which are on a par with what Chernov’s Ukrainian heroes did to the Ivans (read old men and pre-pubescent children) when they stormed into Kursk on Zelensky’s self serving orders; as I write this in late August, some of the elderly babushkas (Ivanas?) Chernov’s vile heroes manhandled, kidnapped and God knows what else to in Kursk are only now being released in exchange for captured Ukrainian storm troopers.
But PBS, Chernov and Mizner are not into highlighting any of that or the USMC’s finest scalping “gooks” and scraping the brains of navy corpsmen off their boots. Much like Scahill, their game is to crawl on all fours into Hollywood over the bodies of decomposing Russians and Ukrainians and, like Scahill or executed Nazi war criminal Julius Streicher, they should be eternally despised for that.
Though Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg, Waffen SS Captain Lauri Törni fought with distinction for Hitler on the Eastern Front for almost the entire duration of the war before surrendering to British troops in the dying days of the war, after which he joined the American Green Berets and fought in Vietnam from 1963 up to his death in action in October 1965. I mention him here as John Wayne’s Col. Mike Kirby in The Green Berets movie is based on the exploits of Törni, who is the only self-confessed Waffen SS officer to be buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery.
And, if that seems a cheap shot at this latest bunch of Nazis, they can take solace in that, though The Green Berets got panned by the critics, the general public lapped it up, so no doubt Chernov and Mizner hope their latest puke salad will be similarly received.
Though they say that Hollywood has only three plots, if that is true, then that is three more than these unoriginal Streichers have. Still, if it ain’t broken, why should the CIA fix it as long as mud sticks about Russians using cluster bombs (a NATO, not a Russian speciality Russia vociferously objected to) and, as long as Russia doesn’t fight the way the Yanks did in Fallujah, Dresden, Raqqa, Tokyo, Hanoi, Hiroshima and Korea, why not keep spinning nonsense like 2000 Meters to Andriivka? One good reason is because these snuff movies have outlived their sell by dates and the smart thing for the Ukrainians to do is to get Zelensky and his Western co-conspirators off their backs and to sue for peace because, real life Rambos like Törni aside,when all is said and done, living a long and peaceful life is far better than being a dispensable prop in the machinations of Zelensky or these low grade snuff movies that serve only to feed his grift, which now sees Europe spending a further $100 billion it does not have, to buy weapons from America that it does not have, to arm soldiers that Ukraine now no longer has. Maybe they should make a movie under the true life crime franchise about that instead and call it something like Four Weddings and far too many Ukrainian funerals or something similarly catchy, with Zelensky and some other grifters in the lead roles, but they best hurry because the curtain will be coming down very soon on their Ukrainian grift.
* 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a PBS Frontline & AP “Documentary”, now showing in a cinema near you
