Saints and Soldiers starts out with the Malmedy Massacre during the Battle of the Bulge, which the director actually describes as being partly the prisoners own fault. There are so many different accounts on what really happened so there is by no means a clear picture on how the Malmedy Massacre happened. Saints and Soldiers shows one possible sequence of events.

The beginning of the movie is great, but after the first part of the story is over it’s only downhill. There are two main reasons that this movie isn’t as good as it could be — the actors are bad and they don’t get much help from the poorly written dialog either. The story itself is good with a few exceptions, but it’s very predictable.

There is a religious overtone to the movie, and maybe it should be said that it’s a Mormon production even though I didn’t know this until I visited the IMDb boards. The atheist (a medic) is shown as a jerk and the most religious guy is more or less the “saint” but even he has a dark secret. It’s a good movie for being an independent WWII movie.