I tumbled to this one as part of a large pruning-out of a friend's DVD collection, and although this one won't be a keeper for my own library, it was still a worthwhile watch, if only for the novelty of Tom Selleck doing an extraordinary job of portraying Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Mr. Selleck, to be totally honest, looks nothing like Eisenhower, even with his head and mustache shaved, but just as Gretchen Mol strutted her stuff to great effect in "The Notorious Bettie Page," Mr. Selleck rises to the occasion and embodies Ike with a remarkable verisimilitude that allows his audience to ignore the physical discrepancy. It is definitely one of Selleck's shining moments as an actor.
The script has its problems, but this is no surprise in a talking heads story about the concerns of mounting the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. Certain events are shuffled about and compressed temporally, some are created out of whole cloth, and a few seem to be egregious mistakes (cf. Ike's chat with troopers of the 101st Airborne on the wrong day), but mostly it's all in service of the story. Within the context of a two hour made-for-TV docu-drama, it works. Complaint can be made about the portrayal of various persons, notably General Patton, Field Marshall Montgomery, and Charles DeGaulle (whose nose isn't nearly big enough), but these are all minor lights orbiting the main star, Ike. If nothing else, the film properly leads one to further exploration of the events chronicled; there is a wealth of information out there, needless to say.
Selleck really does a bang-up job, reining in his Magnum P.I. persona almost completely to portray a man who not only had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but also carried its very fate in his hands. I think Ike himself would have been pleased.
Mr. Selleck, to be totally honest, looks nothing like Eisenhower, even with his head and mustache shaved, but just as Gretchen Mol strutted her stuff to great effect in "The Notorious Bettie Page," Mr. Selleck rises to the occasion and embodies Ike with a remarkable verisimilitude that allows his audience to ignore the physical discrepancy. It is definitely one of Selleck's shining moments as an actor.
The script has its problems, but this is no surprise in a talking heads story about the concerns of mounting the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. Certain events are shuffled about and compressed temporally, some are created out of whole cloth, and a few seem to be egregious mistakes (cf. Ike's chat with troopers of the 101st Airborne on the wrong day), but mostly it's all in service of the story. Within the context of a two hour made-for-TV docu-drama, it works. Complaint can be made about the portrayal of various persons, notably General Patton, Field Marshall Montgomery, and Charles DeGaulle (whose nose isn't nearly big enough), but these are all minor lights orbiting the main star, Ike. If nothing else, the film properly leads one to further exploration of the events chronicled; there is a wealth of information out there, needless to say.
Selleck really does a bang-up job, reining in his Magnum P.I. persona almost completely to portray a man who not only had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but also carried its very fate in his hands. I think Ike himself would have been pleased.