Vojna akademija Online

Pure military propaganda. Regardless of what you think about an army, this TV show represents rather unrealistic image of the army education in Serbia. If some kid would go to the military academy with the expectations from this show, he would be rather disappointed. Lots of pretty army girls that get hooked up with rather plain guys, lots of personal stories, all emotional to the max. What is realism in Serbian army: not a lot of girls, only few. Army is appealing to either extremist that likes guns and nationalism or the poor or uneducated person. The food is bad, everything is dirty and old and outdated. Here you can see the opposite of all this. The army looks more like the one of the western armies. I personally cannot see anything going worse than this.

There are several things wrong with this series, and I need to address them point by point.

1. Do not expect to learn anything about the military. All the characters there merely exist to fall in love, so it could very well be labelled as a romance. The girls are giggly and physically unfit, clearly not army material. As a woman, this is quite disappointing because women in this series are portrayed as individuals who will never be as good as the men in the army and serve as token recruits.

2. This is very Americanised, lacking any Serbian authenticity (if you want so something remotely close to the Serbian army life, checkout Bolji Zivot - Boba doing military service). From the whistling theme tune (which was the anthem of American soldiers in Vietnam) to character dialogues, everything was clearly ripped of from some American series like JAG and simply looks awkward in Serbia's setting. In the first episode, one female plays American football. I would understand maybe basketball, an American sport popular in Serbia, but this isn't popular anywhere outside the USA! The next point would shed light on why this irritating Americanisation exists.

3. Since required military service has become non-existent recently in Serbia, the government (Democratska Stranka in particular, that is fond of adopting Western values) has been trying to encourage people to join the army. What is particularly disgusting in the series is that these recruits will assist NATO operations - yep, the very NATO that bombed the country in 1999 and pressured it with embargoes. Shame on the creators of the series for trying to make Serbs forget the past - we would never see Americans cooperate with Al-Quaeda since 9/11 happened will we? Overall I gave this 3/10, merely because it loosely holds my attention so I wonder what happens next.

After watching first two or three episodes I must admit I expected more. This looked very promising, it looked like a TV Show about real Serbian Army, i expected more focus on training, weapons, and everything linked to military, but now it looks like a love store and Military Academy is just something sideshow... There are also some mistakes in showing Serbian Armed Forces (Vojska Srbije) for example: soldiers are saluting without hats that is not permitted in Serbian Army. After watching this show Serbian Army looks like something not so hard and officers are joking with their students, allowing them some things that are not regular in the army. I served Serbian Armed Forces for 3 months on volunteer base, so things are different in real life than in this show.

There's only one good reason to watch this - Tamara Dragicevic who quite literally stole the show. OK, so I was curious enough to take a look once it became available on-line so I could watch in blocks of 3-4 episodes at a time and skip boring parts. The high concept of mixing military academy training and de-facto teen drama (couples forming and breaking like it was a Josh Schwartz prod) is viable but the execution of that idea in this particular show was lousy and amateurish. The writing was so lazy with so many clichés that every now and then one has to cringe. There's significant percentage of filler material and even worse filler sequences that are repeated in several episodes. Direction and cinematography were the ones that looked really amateurish. Since this show reportedly had full military backing and government funds available these things have to be blamed on the lack of hard work to think through the scenes, frames and details. The saving grace was the ensemble of young actors eager to show off their skills, but with neglectful direction there were huge variations in the resulting quality. In particular, Tamara Dragicevic (as Nadica) stood an order of magnitude above the crowd with exceptional command of modern facial acting (even doing transitions like a seasoned pro) and effortless presence. She just went stealing scenes and then episodes and eventually the show. This phenomenon tends to happen in shows with sub-par direction where one actor emerges as an unstoppable force (Leighton Meester did similar thing in "Gossip Girl") while director is not watching. Someone needs to bring that girl to L.A. ASAP.