Storming Juno shows stories of Canadian—you heard me, Canadian—soldiers during the Normandy Invasion.The film features Benjamin Muir as Lt. Bill Grayson, Kevin Walker as Paratrooper Dan Hartigan and Philip Van Martin as a tank commander, Sgt. Leo Gariepy. Even though the stories of all three soldiers are documented, the producers only claim the film is “based on on actual characters and events.”
It was made for a Canadian History Channel equivalent and looks like it. I don’t particularly want to criticize this film; for a made for television docudrama that was filmed in two weeks, it’s very good. It is also the only release I know of about Juno Beach. It is, however, not highly engaging or cohesive.
Because it was made for television, it has some features that don’t translate well to home viewing. It has a short introduction that shows clips of upcoming scenes—”stay tuned: this exciting thing will happen.” It also occasionally fades to black where the commercial breaks would be and has short resets coming out of these breaks, though the resets here aren’t as long and annoying as those resets can be.
This isn’t a trailer; this is how the film starts
After the credits it seems to then jump right in—we’re in a plane with paratrooper Hartigan doing a voice over, but then it’s time for black and white archival footage with our first history lesson. The same damn bait and switch Band of Brothers had—we’re about to take off for Normandy. “Hey, remember when we were training?”
That’s generally how the show works; we come out of a commercial break to one of the three focal characters narrating the scene and throwing in some history over some archival footage, then we move to the scene proper.
There isn’t really that much downtime otherwise, in part because the whole thing is pretty short. Most of the dialogue-heavy scenes are overly dramatic; sometimes it’s the actor, but it is too pervasive to scapegoat the actors; someone involved in the production firmly believes a close up of someone yelling conveys grit and determination.
Also there’s the voiceover narration. I want to start a movement to limit all voice overs in war movies to the beginnings and endings. This may be a personal bias, but it is bad here. We have three characters who tell their stories, and I can rarely tell them apart. I think one has a different accent, but they all speak in the same tone and use similar language, almost as if one person wrote all the dialogue.
That joke doesn’t work. I know one person wrote the dialogue and many fine authors have all their characters speak alike, but here I’m sometimes not sure who’s talking, and they rarely give much insight. A character going down a ladder entering a German bunker informs us, “I entered the bunker.” This kind of glaring redundancy happens more than once.
The voiceovers also remove tension. If they’re talking, they’re going to survive to tell—sure that’s not universally true in film, but a movie like this is tremendously unlikely to violate that convention, so when the characters are in danger, you’re not worried. You’re another step back from the action.
All of this is a little unfair; this was produced for a history television channel and filmed in fourteen days, eleven days less than the first twenty odd minutes of Saving Private Ryan. And the combat sequences are strong.
The combat is well done. It is a mixture of made-for-television documentary quality CGI and live-action material. For those of you who care, the German MG 42s sound like MG 42s. Though the production doesn’t have the money to show us a large portion of the battlefield, director Tim Wolochatiuk keeps the frame tight and creates action as good as, probably better than, The Big Red One or most war movies being made in its era.
The individual stories feature aspects of the Normandy Invasion you rarely see anywhere else. One character enters a bunker’s tunnel system. Another is the commander of a Duplex-Drive tank, the Sherman tanks with huge flotation devices that were mainly lost in the choppy waters. I’m not aware of any other movie that even shows them. We’re with a crew as their cabin starts to fill with water, over a mile away from land, and the commander tells his driver, “Tell me when it gets to your knees.” The tank segments are really cool, though the commander sure seems very angry about things, and the German anti-tank gunners seem a little bad at their jobs.
If I were in a tank in the English Channel, I would find water coming in upsetting.
The three stories are strong; they’re interesting, and the combat in them is well done. Storming Juno has a lot going for it, but maybe not enough.
At the end of the movie, it goes directly into interviews with veterans. This part is called Remembering Juno, but you don’t select it from a menu; it just plays. I would prefer a little more agency in my viewing. If you go to chapter selection from the main menu, there’s no clear indication of where it is or that it even exists. It’s Chapter 12. You’re welcome.
These interviews are fine; they are like other interviews with veterans—some are mundane, and some are moving. One story is from a pay clerk who, after helping to take the beach, had to walk among the dead, including his friends, to record their names, so they wouldn’t be paid.
There is one interview with a German soldier who was captured by Canadians. He speaks shortly after a section where two Canadians talk about how they were ordered not to take prisoners and at least hint that they shot some—something the film doesn’t mention—in fact the film shows prisoners being taken and does not show prisoners being shot.
Some of the veterans complain that Canadians are overlooked in movies and other conversations about the war, and Americans are overpraised. At one point during the documentary portion we see this famous clip of the Juno landings, one often shown in documentaries and films–films often not about the landings at Juno Beach.
The limited research I’ve done on the topic, including reviewing three movies this week that focus on the Americans on Omaha Beach (and choosing not to review two others) suggests it’s absolutely true. Here’s what I wrote about Canadian representation in The Longest Day: “We don’t see the Canadians on Juno at all, except for possibly in the strafing run shot, though Lawford throws some Canadians a ‘bon chance.’” That’s all we see of Canadians in the movie that’s trying to give the whole story.
This article about must-see war films featuring Canada mentions The Battle of Britain, where Christopher Plummer plays a Canadian pilot and The Devil’s Brigade, which is about a joint US and Canadian Brigade that an American, played by William Holden, commands. Notice the authors are forced to say “featuring,” not “about.” I remember enjoying the World War I film about Canadian forces Passchendaele, but I’m a Paul Gross fan, and Gross is in one of the other movies listed in the article. Tobruk stars Illinois-native Rock Hudson as a Canadian in the Long Range Desert Group. If I were Canadian, I might be more than a little disappointed in how my history was represented.
The 2021 Netflix release The Forgotten Battle, ostensibly about The Battle of the Scheldt, spends more screen time on a very small group of English glider troops who happen to end up in the area than on the Canadian troops.
This creates an odd space for this work. I couldn’t recommend you pay money for something of this quality if it were about the Omaha Beach landings because there are works showing that that are just plain better. This, however, is the best thing I’ve seen about Juno. If you can point me to another film, please do.
I bought Storming Juno whatever year Blockbuster went out of business, so I’m sure I got a good price for it, and the combat scenes are very strong, but I don’t think I can encourage you to spend money to see this film, unless you’re a completist or an enthusiast—or maybe Canadian.
Recommendation
Even though it ignores the Canadian contribution on D-Day, you should get the steelbook of The Longest Day and treasure it forever.
If you are a history buff, or Canadian, you could buy Storming Juno.
Maybe just get a board game about the Normandy invasion that ignores all Allied forces except America. Shut Up and Sit Down has a review of Undaunted Normandy that compares it to other World War II games and also discusses some of the biases in board games about the Second World War.