Tuntematon Sotilas (Aku Louhimies, 2017)

Version 3.0 of The Unknown Soldier comes over 30 years after the second iteration and over sixty years after the first, furnished with a bigger budget and hence replete with bigger bangs and more artful photography, in partial justification of retelling the story once more and to ensure that this generation will also flock to see it in droves, although the top-selling Finnish novel ever is so revered that the screenplay pretty much writes itself as a plethora of key lines and scenes have to be adhered to. This does automatically run the risk of making the notion of a remake rather redundant.
The plot, in brief, follows one infantry company through the 1941-1944 Continuation War against the Soviet Union as the Finns first seek to regain what they lost under Soviet assault a year earlier and then, when the tide inevitably turns against them, to survive as an independent nation under the onslaught. The film adaptations assume the viewer's full familiarity with the history and also the characters of the novel, so there is little in the way of exposition for outsiders, but the utter lack of jingoism, glorification of war - even in defence of one's country - or exaggerated action still comes across clearly as does a fundamental cynicism about human motivations and a deep sense of omnipresent threat.
The combat scenes towards the end are overlong, hammering home the point of impending doom, and the three-hour-long film would have benefited from more fleshing out of peripheral characters instead of choosing to focus so heavily on the redrafted middle-aged farmer Rokka, a reluctant killing machine without any regard for authority, as charismatic the persona and the actor's performance may be. It's also easy to get the feeling that the Finnish army was all but wiped out simply because most of the named characters bite the bullet. Nevertheless, just as with the previous versions, one overriding uncommon virtue in the war film genre remains: it's so artless and unstylised that there is no doubt that this is really what it must feel like to face unseen and indifferent death.

7/10