Perfect cast and a good story

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This film looked mildly interesting on Netflix so we ordered it. The first serious problem? No sub-titles. Why, you ask, would someone need titles for an English-language movie? The accents, mate! I'd actually spent time in England and I could understand maybe 50% of the dialogue. The thick Northern English dialect was incomprehensible to my wife. This isn't the filmmaker's fault as much as a distributor releasing it on the cheap. But then again, as dreary as the film turned out to be I can't imagine it ever had much of an audience. The plot turns slowly around rail workers who had a nifty deal under British Rail, forced to adjust when the government got tired to subsidizing a state rail system and sold it off to private investors.

Saying frankly, I did not enjoy, nor being moved by the movie. The story is neither dramatic nor exciting. The lead character is not well defined and thus easy to confuse the audience. After watching it, being little bit disappointed, I went out to walk my dog, but the movie occupied my thought even after I came home. This is a story in railway workers in the UK, however I could see similar situation in Japan too. In Japan, many companies are gradually recovering from serious downfall. But during the process of profit recovery, companies have replaced fixed-cost employees by variable cost contract workers. As a result, the lifetime employment system has collapsed, and the power of the unions, the members of which are employees only, have been eroding. At the same time, number of contract workers, who do not have systematic training and skills building, has increased. In this trend the gap between peoples of high wages and low wages are becoming wider. British society has been many years the forerunner in the world of winning the rights of workers. But these rights are now too easily forgotten under the pressure of global economy. This is a social crisis in longer term. At least this movie has succeeded to portray this crisis.

Ken Loach films are always worth watching, because his characters are so believeable. Mostly it feels like you're watching a documentary. That is because of the mostly fantastic acting."The Navigators" are about five railway workers, who after the privatisation of the British Rail are deformed in their class consciousness. It goes so far that they prefer to have one of them probably killed (while they are moving him) instead of getting their private rail company into trouble. This is also about capitalistic lack of efficiency. The workers smash tools instead of selling them, ordered by their employers. Instead of getting concrete by train, they transport it in buckets, because that's the cheapest (but most slow) way.Some people might say that Ken Loach is repeating himself. That's wrong, because he deals with people, who all are different, although they are workers. His message needs to be repeated too. Greed of the few is much more important than other peoples dignity and lives. And it doesn't matter that a "labour" party rules Britain.

The subject is the dead of British rail. Just as "Fermeture des usines Renault à Vilvoorde", it describes the changes and the insecurity of the closing down of the old management and the changes with the new boss Gilchrist Engineering in South Yorkshire in 1995. This movie is based on the memories of railway-man Rob Dawber who wrote the script. The workers have now to work with unexperienced part-time workers. The working conditions are poor and this has its consequences on the quality of the work. The overtaking by a private company brings more profit but it has its side-effects. The workers are mostly real workers from Sheffield and you can hear it from their accent. The maintenance of the railways is very poor and the movie has a dark humor because the result is that some people die. The liberal industrial policy as a result of the Thatcher government means that the state has no longer the control on essential security matters. Good description of the family tragedy when some loose their jobs. Thomas Craig (Mick) and Joe Duttine (Paul) are good.