Movie Analysis: Joyeux Noel

War is never easy and as much as people try to justify the reasons behind it, no one really wins in the end. If a war is between two countries or groups they both end in the same end results, human casualties. When people are asked why wars exist, all might give different answers or some might not even know what to say. I think no one is right or wrong in certain situations. There is no real answer behind why wars exist, the real answer might be a little hard to find. We only know that it ends with deaths of thousands of soldiers. Watching the film Joyeux Noel gave me a different way to think about war and who fights in wars. I believe the film delivered a great message overall and definitely had several religious connotations to it.

The message

The first and biggest one is the belief of Christmas among the soldiers from the three countries. We can see that a few of them are saddened by the reality that they will not spend Christmas with their loved ones. From this, we can conclude that they all share the same relative religion and how they not might be different from each other then they originality thought or learned from before. In the name of the holiday spirit they were able to part aside their differences and celebrate together with no evil intention that we see in war. They also all share a mass directed by the Scottish deacon who was in the battlefield and all seemed to follow along together. I think that night, the soldiers realized or came into clarity that instead of seeing their worst enemy in front of them they saw another fellow soldier who was doing the same exact thing as they were which was survive the best they could. They learned that they were in the same hell hole and had compassion toward one another. Which is why later on in the film everyone was hesitant to kill another soldier, they had seen them and befriended them and when you become someone’s friend it is harder to pull the trigger and kill them. Another religious aspect was when they all agreed to cease fire once again in order to gather and bury their fallen brothers. Digging graves and going through a dead soldier’s belonging we saw that some had belt with a religious saying. Then I can recall one solider placing an object into a dead person’s mouth. This can possibly show that it might be some kind of tradition and could be followed up by a religious aspect. Near the end of the movie, when superiors find out about the soldiers agreement that even the bishop finds out and comes to scolds the deacon I think it was very hypocritical. Here is a man of faith, who is supposed to preach about preserving human lives is preaching about killing those evil