“Sisu” is boring, morally repulsive propaganda

Today I reluctantly watched this movie so I could write a review, and I completely regret it. Sisu is, and I’m not exaggerating, one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life. And no, I don’t think it is a coincidence that we saw a suspiciously well-funded theatrical release of a Finnish war movie right around the same time as they joined NATO.

“Sisu,” as explained in the opening title card, is a Finnish word that can’t be translated, which is translated as “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination.” Sir, this sounds like a translation to me.

But anyway, Sisu is a counter-factual revenge porn fantasy set in 1944, featuring a stone-faced silent protagonist who kills large numbers of German soldiers who had tried to steal his gold and shoot his dog. If this sounds like a mix of John Wick and Rambo, you’re absolutely correct – except those were movies made by people with actual talent and skill.

To explain the movie, I’ll just show you the trailer. This truly does have all the information you need, and watching the movie itself is a formality that doesn’t need to be repeated.

First off, Sisu‘s budget was €6 million, which is a pittance compared to say, a Marvel movie, but it’s not a small amount of money. It’s not clear to me where all that cash went, because it certainly didn’t go into making the movie. Sisu is 90 minutes of fewer than 20 people walking around an empty field with two trucks, and the German “panzer” is a Finnish T-55 with an iron cross (it ironically looks the same as the Ukrainian T-55s getting blown up in Donbass). Consider a much better movie, like the 2016 The Birth of a Nation, which featured much more demanding and larger sets and period costumes from the 1800s American South, a much larger cast of actors, several fairly large battle scenes, and a 120 minute run-time, all for $8.5 million. Also, unlike Sisu, The Birth of a Nation actually had a plot and interesting characters.

A very obvious green screen

Speaking of plot and characters, Sisu is an English language production, meaning it was filmed with an English script and dialogue, not dubbed afterward. I really have to question why this was, especially considering the English is, being generous here, poor. For example, a German soldier says “What do you got there? You got gold in those bags?” and most of the rest of the dialogue isn’t any better than that, and all with a very thick accent. I would understand if this was a movie about German soldiers invading an English-speaking country, but it doesn’t make any sense for 1940s Germans and Finns to be speaking English to each other. From a production standpoint, filming in English was a strange decision, as many of the actors were clearly not very proficient in English, and it’s not even clear that the scriptwriters know English so good. This leads me to believe that Sisu isn’t a genuine “grassroots” Finnish production, and was always intended to be aimed at a foreign audience.

The movie’s historical basis is also total nonsense. The German war crimes and atrocities against the Finns as depicted in the movie are all completely made up. So Sisu is yet another example of people falsely claiming to be victims of WWII when they were not, and were actually perpetrators of it. The real Lapland War was an extremely mild affair; the Finns only fought their nazi allies reluctantly, because Stalin forced them to (so he’s the real baddy, I guess).

Naturally, there’s the obligatory anti-Russian sentiment. Bad Russian soldiers murdered the main character’s family because they’re evil (I mean the Russians are evil, not the family).

Sisu feels like a film put together by a teenager who just discovered Quentin Tarantino, and decided that no other research or artistic references were necessary. There are even goofy title cards in front of each scene, but none of them are clever and literally just say what’s about to happen. The last title card is literally “final chapter,” like a placeholder that was supposed to be replaced by something else before being rendered but they forgot.

Saying the plot is awful is too generous because that would imply there was a plot to begin with. It’s just a string of action scenes, each one more ridiculous than the previous. Again, it makes me think of a film student who just learned about Chekhov’s gun. Like if you see a gun on the wall in the first act of the story, someone should use it in the second act. But what if everything was Chekhov’s gun? If there is an object in the room, literally any object, it only exists because the main character (I’m going to call him MC because I don’t remember his name and don’t care) will need it in a few minutes. For example, he continues carrying around his gold mining equipment long after it would have made sense to abandon it. But later in the movie, he will need these tools for extremely specific tasks, so he keeps them, even though he couldn’t have possibly predicted those tasks would be necessary (like using his pickaxe to attach himself to a German plane, or using an iron plate to deflect bullets Wonder Woman style). The German commander escapes on a plane with a bomb attached to it, even though there’s no plausible reason for a plane to have a bomb while on a transport mission – the bomb only exists so MC can make the nazi fall and explode like in a cartoon.

In even more extreme examples, Sisu‘s plot contrives ludicrous ways to give MC tools and modes of transportation he will need next. This very often features his enemies literally giving him their vehicles. The first time, he jumps in the water, and rather than wait for him to drown like normal people, the Germans paddle out in a boat, and then… jump into the water one at a time and deliberately allow themselves to be killed, allowing him to escape – and leaving the rest of the Germans without a boat so they can’t chase him. Literally every single German vehicle shown in the movie is eventually stolen. Understand what I am saying. This movie was written, filmed, and screened without anyone thinking this is contrived and repetitive.

There’s also what I call reverse Chekhov’s gun. If an object ceases to be useful to MC, or would cause a problem for him, that object must be immediately abandoned. Even if that requires an enemy to deliberately throw away a weapon or asset that he will immediately need. Throughout the movie, German soldiers ride on top of their tank. But in one of the later scenes, MC needs to be able to kill all the people in the other vehicles without being noticed. So in that one specific scene, with no explanation, the Germans ride inside the tank with the hatches closed, so they can’t see him. Before he gets on his escape plane, the German commander shoots his own man. Literally the only reason for this is because when MC sneaks on the plane a few minutes later for the final obligatory fist fight, it would be hard for him to beat two people, so one of them has to die.

When the commander notices MC breaking into his plane after takeoff, he picks up a machine gun, but unholsters his pistol and leaves it in the cockpit. There’s no reason for him to do this except to make sure he doesn’t have a second weapon when MC knocks away the machine gun. MC is the chosen one, and everyone else is truly going to the ends of the earth to make sure he wins.

All of the villains are blind, deaf, stupid, have no sense of self-preservation, and don’t react to threats. They basically just die deliberately, and considering how awful this movie is, I don’t blame them for wanting to check out as quickly as possible. And this stupidity isn’t just limited to the villains but MC too. Nobody acts out of logic, common sense, or even consistently. They just do whatever the plot requires of them.

MC is just as guilty of this as the nazis. Like you saw in the trailer, this movie starts with him discovering gold. He can see battles being fought very close by. And yet instead of hiding the gold and coming back for it later like a normal person, he decides to just pile it all into his saddle bags and start treking down the road. Then he’s stopped almost immediately by soldiers who want the gold for themselves, which should have been an extremely obvious outcome. He doesn’t even try to conceal the fact that he’s a gold miner, for God’s sake. After killing the first group of soldiers, he leaves one of them alive with a piece of gold in his hand, advertising the fact they had found someone with a huge amount of gold and he’s still close by. MC is supposed to be an elite commando and outdoorsman, but you would never guess that from watching him. Real special forces are good at hiding and covering their tracks, but he’s awful at it. MC always stays on main roads where it’s extremely easy to follow him. But of course, if he just went and hid in the wilderness, the Germans wouldn’t be able to find him and the movie would be over, so he has to be dumb to drive the plot forward.

This weird picking up and dropping of objects as they fall in and out of convenience as some sort of meta self-awareness, or maybe a total lack of self-awareness. That’s the thing about meta stories, they tend to be written by people who want to flex their self-awareness but they don’t actually have any. So the Mcguffin of this movie is, of course, MC’s gold. There’s an obvious potential moral lesson here about greed and the foolish acts of cruelty it can cause people to commit, but there’s none of that here. The gold, like everything else in Sisu, is cartoonishly fake. It’s obviously just spray-painted prop rocks that don’t weigh anything and don’t even look like gold – there’s even a few shots when there’s CGI to make them appear as if they’re glinting in the sun, and it looks just as bad as it sounds.

As far as gold is concerned, I don’t want to say I completely hated this movie, there was one scene I actually liked. MC’s horse is blown up by a landmine and he scrounges around in the dirt in a feeble attempt to gather up his spilled gold while the Germans catch up to him and watch with contempt on their faces. I really liked this because it’s a good setup for MC to realize that gold is a stupid motivation and he’s making a fool of himself, but of course the movie doesn’t take this moment anywhere. He just picks up his gold and easily escapes, as usual.

The second point in the movie that might have been interesting is when the Germans succeed in stealing the gold, leaving just one piece with him (they attempt to kill him, but as always, screw it up and he survives). He’s very badly wounded and out of frustration, discards the gold nugget. I found that interesting, because at this point he still has his life and still has his dog. MC could, at this moment, realize his folly and simply be glad he escaped. But, of course, MC and the movie refuses to ever learn any useful moral lesson.

Along the way, MC rescues some girls who help him kill the Germans, and I thought it would be nice if he shared some of the gold with them for their troubles but of course that would be a good thing to do, and no one in this movie does anything good, not even by accident. That’s the biggest problem with Sisu. And it’s equally concerning that so many people liked it, and for this very reason.

Really, as I watched the movie, I felt more and more contempt for MC. When he first discovers gold, he cries like a schoolboy, and for what? He’s an old man with no family crying over gold so he can do what? Make a swimming pool out of gold and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck? He repeatedly demonstrates that gold is the only thing he cares about. He doesn’t even care about his cute dog and repeatedly puts it in danger.

As I watched him crying over gold, I actually thought of the 1959 Soviet movie Fate of a Man. The hero of that movie resembles MC in many ways. He’s an old soldier who lost his family in a war, and yet his ending is very different. Instead of searching for gold, he adopts a war orphan. So he doesn’t die rich like the MC in Sisu, but who’s happier?

Both left-wing and right-wing critics and commentators almost unanimously loved Sisu, and for this exact absence of morality. For example, one leftist critic declared:

Sometimes you need a film with nuance and sensitivity, a meditation on the nature of human frailty. And sometimes all you want is a grizzled Finnish gold prospector relentlessly slaughtering cartoon evil Nazis in a variety of inventive and messy ways

Sisu has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet, another fairly recent WWII movie, Midway, has a 42% rating. So if reviewers love Sisu, why would they hate Midway? I think, unfortunately, the answer is obvious. First off, Midway is about American WWII heroes, and American leftists consider any kind of patriotism or national pride as bad and evil. They can tolerate patriotism only when it is a surrogate in a foreign country, like Ukraine, Israel, or Finland. Sisu does one better, there’s just mindless gore and no sense of patriotism at all. It’s actually anti-patriotic, as MC very explicitly not interested in defending his country, even as it’s being destroyed in a war. I mean really, imagine a highly skilled combat veteran meandering around looking for gold in the middle of a war. Even the Germans who signed up to fight for Hitler are in some sense better than MC. This is the type of nihilism that gets our lefties very excited.

As for leftist critics excitement about watching nazis being killed on screen. Well, it’s concerning and I don’t actually think this is a quality to be proud of. So you enjoy watching an approved, non-controversial enemy being murdered on screen. Good for you, I guess. And yet, what kind of nazis are we dealing with here? The oafish buffoons in Sisu don’t actually resemble historical nazis in any way. When I think of nazi soldiers, I imagine sharply dressed troops with refined, well-educated officers, in the tradition of Bismark.The problem of course is that depicting nazis in this way would humanize them, which would make these leftists uncomfortable. It might also too closely match the modern German army, which would be politically problematic. But I think the bigger motivation is that modern movie nazis have to be generic. The nazi villains in Sisu are a blank slate onto which people can project their own political enemies, like Russians or Donald Trump supporters.

What’s equally concerning to me is that right-wing critics also love Sisu, and for apparently the same reason. For example a review by the Critical Drinker on YouTube, as well as his fan comments, delight in the fact that MC is just fighting for the selfish reason of getting his gold back. From what I’ve read, Sisu being “not politically correct” and “not woke” is the chief reason for conservative viewers to like it.

I always laugh when conservatives whine about “wokeness” then promote some “alternative” that is just as “woke” as everything else – it’s just that the overton window for woke has shifted a lot over the last 10 years and conservatives are too stupid to notice it. Sisu is no exception. In this movie, he frees a group of captured raped Finnish girls (it is impossible to be female in a western war movie without being raped), and they help him mow down a squad of German soldiers, and then drive a tank. All this despite none of them having ever touched a gun before in their lives. Is this not an example of the “woke feminist girl boss” characters that conservatives constantly whine about?

Not only are conservatives completely blind to wokeness in the movies they like, they actually get mad if someone points it out. They really are people who fall for illusion of choice. Or maybe delusion is a better word.

So… Sisu is not patriotic, but it is also not woke. So it’s just a pure exercise in nihilism. And this is a good thing? Well, politically, yes that is a good thing. Finland is our newest “ally” in NATO, so their supposed military prowess needs to be emphasized to the masses, but without any preachy messaging like patriotism or human goodness. Finland must, at all costs, not be depicted as a good country worth defending. Because good countries worth defending shouldn’t be thrown away and destroyed in pointless proxy wars. But that’s exactly the purpose Finland is meant for now, they’re only purpose. And, at least partially, it’s self-inflicted. Like with Ukraine, nobody forcibly canceled Finland, they canceled themselves. If they wanted to be taken seriously as a deep and rich culture they could have presented themselves as one. But instead, they wanted to be portrayed as a silly and violent cartoon character. Judging from Finnish sentiment about Sisu, that’s they wanted, apparently, so it’s what they deserve.

Ian Kummer

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