Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

bellino-angelo2014 This is a standard WWII movie from the 1950s, but it's not recommended only to fans of the genre, but to movie buffs that like all-star casts full of up-and-coming actors!The cinematography is stunning, and the editing nice, and the soundtrack is also great, with his rousing song that suits perfectly the movie. And the plot kept me interested all the time.All the actors give top-notch performances: Richard Widmark is the platoon commander, and while is tough, he shows an human side in his flashback of his teaching days when he helped a student suffering from stutter. A pre-evil Jack Palance stars as Widmark's co-commander. Richard Boone, Karl Malden, Jack Webb, Robert Wagner (in his debut), Bert Freed and Neville Brand gave good supporting performances. And even Martin Milner and Skip Homeier star as two young marines.By the way, the best characteristic about this movie was his realism - no use of stock footage, real planes of the period the movie was set, plus, it's not larger than life. Recommended to all war movie fans.

snake0331 At age 10, in 1960, I watched the "Halls of Montezuma" movie on television. In 1968, I found myself in the U.S. Marine Corps serving as a machine-gunner in the infantry. Sometimes, movies have a way of becoming true reality; and, because the movie gave me a little insight and understanding of the brutality of war, in some way, I owe a debt of gratitude to the movie.

grahamsj3 This is one of a slew of WW2 films made in the late 40's and early 50's, some better than others. This is definitely one of the better ones. This film features a whole bunch of future stars, such as Richard Widmark, Karl Malden, Richard Boone, Jack Palance, Robert Wagner, Jack Webb and Martin Milner. Most of them hadn't completely honed their skills yet and a couple of the performances are either a bit wooden (Malden, Wagner and Webb) or overdone (Widmark). The technology is very primitive by today's standards, yet this film holds up well. The acting aside, it seems that every effort was made to make the film as realistic as it could be. In that respect, this film is much better than some of the others of the same era. There are a lot of films from this era. If you choose to watch only a few of them, make sure this is one of the few.

telegonus Halls Of Montezuma is a busy, Technicolored war film circa 1950, and was a big hit in its day. The story-line, such as it is, is convoluted and not really worth going into. Basically the film is about the psychology of war and its effect on human relations, especially those created by the war itself. A good deal of the film, as I recall, takes place in caves, ditches and deserted buildings. Unlike most war films this one emphasizes the fact the most soldiers, even Marines, are made, not born; they all come from someplace and would like to return there, preferably in one piece. Lewis Milestone directed the picture, and while it is a far cry from his classic All Quiet On the Western Front, this film is no shabby piece of work. Richard Widmark heads a cast of future stars, and they all perform well, if a bit too strenuously at times. The actors tend to be grouped together a good deal, maybe to ensure that no one can outshine anyone else, and this, plus the emphasis on isolated settings, succeeds in making the film strangely intimate. The color is bright and often glaring, and the Pacific island setting well-rendered. It's worth mentioning as a footnote that the studio that made the picture, 20th Century-Fox, would soon be switching over to making almost exclusively CinemaScope films, and would also soon be dropping Technicolor for the cheaper De Luxe color. Their post CinemaScope product is for the most part vastly inferior than what they previously had been doing, and Halls Of Montezuma, while not a great film, shows, even today, just how beautiful Technicolor could be. This, plus the use of the square, tidy space movies were limited to in those pre-wide screen days, makes for a depth in perspective that is at times almost seductive, even in so grim a film as this.