Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, "The Monuments Men" is an action-thriller focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. It would be an impossible mission: with the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could these guys -- seven museum directors, curators, and art historians, all more familiar with Michelangelo than the M-1 -- possibly hope to succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of culture, they would risk their lives to protect and defend mankind's greatest achievements.
Though this film has an interesting and remarkable premise (you hardly hear about art being pilfered by Hitler during the war), the movie was a slight let down. I can't quite place my finger on what is wrong here - perhaps it was that the climax of the movie was not much of a climax at all, and that we didn't really know what the characters were doing. Moral dilemmas raised throughout the movie were not addressed in a way that made the audience feel that all this saving art was worth it (culture is such an overarching concept that vague doesn't even begin to describe it), and we do not know exactly why these group of people were chosen to do what they did. Clooney could have done leaps better if he dared to take some risks and gave a more defined reason for choosing to save art during war, when lives would have meant so much more.
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