Murphy's War

This movie has made me doubt the vaunted "Rotten Tomatoes" rating system, because there is no way this is 100%. The first impression is that it was made with a low budget, because in the opening sequence they use the same aspect of a ship and the same sequence of action but shoot it 30 different ways for about 5 nauseating minutes of "I got the point". Moreover, I think the director and the screenwriter must've both missed film school the day they taught "Character Development" because, with the exception of a thin attempt to give Sian's character a hint of depth near the end of the movie, all the characters--including O'Toole--seem like superficial interlocutors whose only purpose is to carry the contrived plot of this predictable movie to its predictable end. Given the timeframe of when it was made (Vietnam) I get the whole "war is futile" message, but it doesn't play in this case (if my whole crew was murdered in cold blood, I'd probably act the same way). If thats the message you want, "Hell in the Pacific" is the best movie for that. As far as the acting, the doctor played by Sian was miscast, and O'Toole was bigger than this movie. I constantly got the impression that he was trying to make something out of nothing, attempting in vein to give complexity to a flatly written character. It wasn't the worst movie I ever saw, but I regret buying it. UPDATE: This Rotten Tomatoes review listed for Murphy's War is actually for the Fritz Lang movie "M" from the thirties--somehow, it got mistakenly linked to this movie. The true Rotten Tomatoes review for this movie is 0% (no lie) and to tell you the truth, it deserves it.