In 1915, Britain and France try to force open the Dardanelles strait with warships alone, hoping to intimidate the Ottoman Empire into surrendering without a land campaign. When the fleet fails, Allied troops, including newly trained Australian and New Zealand forces from Egypt, land on the Gallipoli peninsula and get pinned down for eight months against entrenched Turkish defenders. Director Tolga Örnek tells the campaign from both sides at once, drawing on soldiers' diaries, letters, and photographs read by narrators Jeremy Irons and Sam Neill, with dramatic recreations placing the viewer in the trenches alongside them. The film follows individual soldiers, Turkish, Australian, British, from their early lives and initial patriotism through the collapse of morale as poor planning and underestimated resistance turn the operation into a stalemate. By the time the Allies withdraw, close to half a million men on both sides are dead or wounded, and the Ottoman defense holds. Historians appear throughout to explain the strategy behind each failed advance, but the personal testimony carries the film.