Regeneration

This film, about war's toll on the mind, is fraught with good intentions but falls short of provoking the emotional response and the moral outrage that seem to be its object. Worse, it comes on the heels of Spielberg's monumental SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and its battle scenes share that film's mud-encrusted palette, if not its kinetic energy. Based on Pat Barker's acclaimed novel, itself part of a trilogy about World War I, it begins in 1917 with poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon's (James Wilby) stint in a military hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. Sassoon, a highly decorated and unquestionably brave soldier, is sent to Craiglockart not because he's mentally ill, ...