Arguably the movie with the most (male) film stars ever assembled. The cast is nothing lees than astounding. The film not so much. While other war movies paint the same picture that war is senseless, this movie questions not only war but the movie itself. I first saw A Bridge too Far when I was ten and was immediately struck of how bleak it ended. Then saw it in my 20s again and looked for something more than just story. Maybe it was a fine film regardless of story. It wasn't. And now being 42 I was seeing it again and the whole movie seems just as pointless. I know, some purpose of the movie was to show how pointless war is in itself, but as I said before countless other war movies have made that before without making the whole movie about nothing. Allied forces trying to capture bridges in Holland, suffer heavy casualties, have to retreat, ending up right where they started and a whole lot of people died for nothing. Yes, that's war and I guess this absurdity is depicted here. I'm just wondering if this could have been handled better. Showing war is absurd without sacrificing the integrity of the whole film. Longest Day could. Saving Private Ryan could. Hacksaw Ridge could as well. This falls short. Too bad. The cast deserved better.

Usually when you read the term "stellar" applied to a cast, it's more for marketing purposes to convince us that the cast is better than we might want to think - well not so, here. Connery, Caine, O'Neal, Olivier, Bogarde, Hackman, Hopkins, Caan, Schell & Liv Ullmann all chip into this true telling of "Operation Market Garden" - a co-ordinated attempt by the allies to use almost anything that will fly to parachute troops behind Nazi lines. Their purpose: to secure strategically important river crossings before the enemy have a chance to blow them to smithereens. Their missions are fraught with dangers - bad intelligence, bad weather as well as a tenacious and well established enemy. The planning and actions scenes give a clear dramatic indication of just how logistically complex and risky this whole procedure actually would have been; and as war films go it is much less gung-ho. It is, however, very long - and a bit more judicious editing would have helped keep it more taut.

How do spoilers work with historical movies? Can we reasonably assume that everyone already knows how Market Garden turned out, or are we doing the Millennial thing where we are assuming people don't know where Arnhem is, let alone Antwerp, let alone Holland, let alone who participated in WWII?

The Nazis were part of that one right?

Anyway, this movie has everyone in it, just about everyone that was anyone in 1977 and, from all appearances all of Hollywood was tied up in the making of this film right down to A-list actors in minor roles.

So you kind of know that the acting is there and top notch... and so is the direction.

At least the direction is about as good as you can assume for something that attempts to tell a little too much of the story all at once.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great movie, and when they use the word "Epic" they are talking about epic in scope, and for that scope it does a pretty awesome and very coherent job.

My one issue is the scope, Market Garden was enormous, it was an enormous failure, it was an enormous catastrophy, it was an enormous event, it was an enormous air invasion and this movie attempts to tell all of it at once. The result is that it's spread a little thin Had they made the movie 6 hours long, they might have been able to pull it off flawlessly... but who is going to sit through that?

But no one can really argue with the results. It's not as bad as it could be, and it is a lot better than a movie this epic in scope should be. They achieved something brilliant.

My only wish was that, after the epic failure, they gave Montgomery's infamous "Operation Market Garden was 90% successful" the last words and left it there, left it as a mess with a general trying to save face.