The life of Croatian General Ante Gotovina. As a kid, he ran towards an exploding land mine, and his mother died while trying to protect him. As a young lad, Gotovina fled Yugoslavia under the Communist system and enrolled into the French Foreign Legion, in which he was wounded during a mission in Africa. He went to Colombia as an instructor in the fight against drug dealers, but fell in love with Ximena, who gave birth to their child. In 1 9 9 1, Gotovina heard about Croatia’s war for independence, and thus returned to his country, joining the army. Under Chieff of Staff Janko Bobetko, Gotovina was appointed as a General in Livno, Bosnia, in order to prevent Serbs from Bosnia linking with Serbs from Croatia. In ‘95, he oversaw Operation Storm, which ended the war, but was later indicted by the ICTY Tribunal for war crimes. Gotovina spent years in hiding, until he was arrested and sentenced by the ICTY, but later acquitted of all charges in the appeals process.
"The General" is a work comprised just out of two features: patriotism and idealism. Antun Vroljak’s film, the most expensive in Croatian cinema at the time, with a reported budget of 3 million $, which was later extended into this 8-episode series, is an attempt to make a biopic about Croatian General Ante Gotovina. Vrdoljak, though, took Gotovina’s interesting and adventurous life and placed it at the service of ideological patriotism. And as the old saying goes, beware of movies made only for an ideology. Gotovina was very secretive about his motivations and ambitions at a particular stage in life, and thus Vrdoljak had a difficult task, scrambling to sometime interpret why his protagonist did this or that, or decided to join the French Foreign Legion, for instance. Some plot points are just confusing. For instance, during the childhood segment, there is a badly directed sequence in which an explosives expert, in the middle of the square, shouts that he is about to detonate a land mine. Everyone takes cover, naturally - except for the little kid, Gotovina, who for some reason runs directly towards the land mine (?!), causing his mother to run after him. It is unclear why a kid would run towards an explosive device, how did his mother hear about the warning while he did not, nor what happened in that accident. The extended series also contains a puzzlingly artificial sequence in which a teenage Gotovina and a lad are caught in the middle of a storm on a boat: instead of shouting or hiding, they deliver impossibly poetic sentences and elevated contemplations (“This is the end. God, take our souls!” - “Hold on to your rosary and pray!”), when in reality they would just take cover until the danger is over. An inspired filmmaker would also not waste the opportunity to somehow foreshadow the path of Gotovina: he could have symbolically linked this storm with the future Operation Storm, for instance, by showing the young Gotovina as a defiant ship commander who somehow emerges from the event.
The series gets a little better after the start of the Croatian war, since the story gets more interesting, with a tighter narrative and a certain sense of a purpose, a sense that the protagonist knows where he is going with his decisions. However, ridiculous patriotic exaggerations and illogical plot holes again hinder the story. For example, after a TV program showing Croatian civilians being deported from Aljmaš, General Janko Bobetko suddenly starts talking how the most important thing about a war is memory, claiming that those who forget, lose. Would a General talk to his officers about memory for some future generations during an invasion or would his priority be how to plan to stop the enemy? This whole talk about memory sticks out like a soar thumb, revealing it to be more of an inclusion from modern time, from the political party which commissioned “The General” to constantly remind its patriots-voters about the glorious past, than something someone would ponder about during a crisis. Another example is when a Commander tells Gotovina about the clash in Borovo Selo, pointing out that the Serb paramilitary gouged the eyes of Croat soldiers. He then again goes: “Can you imagine, gouging the eyes of living people?” And then he again goes: “They gouged the eyes of people”, whereupon he gives Gotovina a photo of a mutilated corpse. It is unnecessary to point this out three times, overemphasizing the obvious, since just telling it once would have been sufficient, but the director obviously does not believe in the subtle. An even bigger, more problematic sequence shows up, a one which is a real struggle to sit through its 6 minutes of running time, and makes you nauseous as to when it will finally end. It is the one where the Croat soldiers bring a captured Serb, Ilija, an old Partisan who now fights for the Serb Krajina army, directly to General Bobetko’s office, also an ex-Partisan, who spends the entire sequence - not talking to Ilija - but rather preaching to him about the betrayal of the homeland. At the end of the rant, when Bobetko turns his back towards him, Ilija takes a gun from his pocket - one would think that Ilija is going to shoot Bobetko. But no, Ilija actually draws the gun against himself and commits suicide, ostensibly because he cannot live with his bad conscience anymore. That Croatian army would be so incompetent and not check a POW for a gun before leaving him alone in a room with their Supreme Commander is simply astounding.
There are some virtues, though: episodes 4, 5 and 7 are actually good, while episode 6 is at least good at parts. However, Gotovina is shown as a figure not particularly contributing to the war until Operation Storm, and thus many moments of the conflict are presented through the perspective of various supporting characters, small soldiers, many of which are never seen afterward, while Gotovina mostly just sits in his office and listens to field reports. Moreover, it is interesting that the series does not hide Gotovina’s affair with a Croatian reporter, during which he forgot about his wife and child in Colombia, showing that he is not that noble and idealistic of a person after all. Episode 6 has an insanely written monologue by an older lady who is looking at a young woman, the victim of war rape (“She is afraid that bandit will take away her baby, so she decided not to give birth to it yet. She is hiding it in her womb. It has been two years since she was raped, she is not pregnant, but she imagined she is in her head”). The sole Operation Storm episode is surprisingly underwhelming, without any major action or battle sequences as many hoped for. Puzzlingly, episode 8 spends more time on some 13-minute scene of two Serb Krajina commanders going back and forth about who is to blame, drinking at a table while Knin is bombarded around them, than actually on Gotovina's hiding, arrest, trial and acquittal at the ICTY at the Hague, which was allocated only 3 minutes of archive footage to it. A few moments of Vrdoljak’s old sense for crafting stories still manage to ignite here and there and come to the rescue, though, such as the sequence where a hunter says to Gotovina that “orphans were always the kindest people” or the poignant military observation that during a conflict of two sides the international community tends to be inclined towards the stronger side. There is also an almost poetic scene in the last episode where, instead of enjoying the victory, Gotovina is lost in contemplation, saddened about his friend being wounded, and walks while leaning on to the old, long ancient walls of Knin, the old capital of the Medieval Kingdom of Croatia, symbolically showing how he fulfilled his purpose, completing both his life and the history of the new Croatia. There are some traces of sparks in that scene, almost of Ford's heroes filled with pathos, and one wishes that the entire series beforehand would have had the same inspiration as well, which it lacks.
Grade:+
