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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

It is a performances centric movie

What begins as a feel-good-human-interest story turns into a mystery, then a tragedy, and ultimately an outrage.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The film is not bad, it's obvious how much they worked for its realization, but it is inferior to Sergey Bondarchuk's homonymous film. The actors, with the exception of Audrey Hepburn and Oskar Homolka, they are not at all fit. Vittorio Gassman, Herbert Lom, Henry Fonda, they were very good actors, but not here in this "War and Peace".

Lacks authentic Russian feel. Needed a Selznick to direct this vast canvas on the scale of Gone With The Wind. Fonda miscast but Hepburn and Brett are better. Voice-over scenes are most touching! Fade-outs between scenes a mistake. Some scenes too long., others hardly exist. Rota score underwhelming. Worst line: "Moscow's on fire! How terrible!" (Sonia). Best lines: "He (Andre's father) was the first person in the whole world to disapprove of me. I suppose you're not really grown up till that happens to you" (Natasha). Trivia: In real life, Audrey Hepburn's partner at the time of her death became partner of Henry Fonda's widow.

WAR AND PEACE is an attempt to turn the sprawling epic of the Tolstoy novel into something approaching movie length, although at over three hours this is a long slog. I haven't read the original novel, but speaking to somebody who has, this adaptation misses out plenty.And yet, despite the lengthy running time, this is a movie which feels surprisingly hollow and empty in places. The moral complexity and character depth of the novel is missing, leaving in its place one-dimensional characters who are carried through sweeping panoramas and tumultuous events. Case in point: Audrey Hepburn's character, reduced to a vacuous airhead for much of the running time.There are pluses here, of course, not least Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer, two dependable and entertaining characters - even if they are miscast! The film is also well shot, and the various battle sequences have an epic feel to them, even though the tactics are non-existent. It's hard to dislike a film featuring Herbert Lom as Napoleon, either. However, as an adaptation, WAR AND PEACE is far from definitive.

If you want to bring such an vast, sweeping yet intensely human novel such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace to the screen with both its breadth and depth intact you can do either one of two of things. You can film it page-for-page, and make an eight-hour behemoth, as Sergei Bondarchuk did with the 1960s Russian production. Or, you can prune it down to something more manageable, excising whole characters and subplots, but recreating certain sections of Tolstoy's work more or less verbatim to preserve what is vital about his work. This latter is the approach taken for Dino de Laurentiis's 1956 Italian-American co-production.The narrative here focuses mainly on just three of Tolstoy's characters – Pierre, Natasha and Alexei – portrayed by Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer respectively. Fonda is really too old to play the youthful Pierre, but he is not as severely miscast as some have said, pulling off the early scenes of Pierre as the gangly, drunken student with a fair degree of believability. Hepburn brilliantly handles the aging of her character, transforming the naïve teenager into a mature and confident woman while still maintaining the same core persona. If only something as complementary could be said of Mel Ferrer, who takes to acting the same way anvils take to floating. His appallingness is matched only by the woman who plays his wife, Milly Vitale. There are some decent supporting players though. Herbert Lom gives a surprisingly heartfelt performance as Napoleon. Oskar Homolka brilliantly plays the archetypal scruffy old general who's too high-ranking and experienced to bother with all that decorum business, his gestures forceful but with a half-hearted brevity to them. And John Mills is bizarrely like someone out of a Monty Python film.Director King Vidor was a veteran of old Hollywood and just the sort of director to handle the mix of big canvas and intimacy. He shows what must have been extraordinary patience in setting up hordes of extras, carts and cannons for authentic looking crowd scenes, but then makes them a briefly glimpsed backdrop, never really dwelling on the massive scope or showing it off for its own sake. This seemingly contradictory tack gives us a sense of the story happening in a real place, but never allows it to detract from the main players and their stories. Vidor is constantly implying things with the simplest of cinematic tricks, and this helps to make up for the gaps in plot that the adaptation necessitates. For example, when Hepburn and Vittorio Gassman kiss at the opera, the angle gradually changes to reveal the reflection of a door in a mirror. This subtle move plants the idea in our heads that someone may walk in on them, and it gives the moment a sense of unease and wrongness. Vidor's canny ability to suggest mood and temperament, particularly evident in his framing of the inner monologues during the dance scene, also helps to cover any deficit in the acting.At three-and-a-half hours, this is still quite a long old movie. And yet, thanks to some compelling imagery and strong narrative it moves faster than many a 90-minuter. Shorn of much of Tolstoy's original material as it is, it is still long enough to give us that feeling of the passage of time and development of character, to make Fonda's transition from a foppish lad in Western European attire to a bearded man in Russian garb feel like more than just a change of clothes. This version of War and Peace certainly has a fair few things wrong with it, yet still manages to be a lucid and passionate – if not entirely faithful – adaptation of a great work of literature.