A.C.’s Review: Sooner
or later actors like to get into the director’s chair. With the movie
UNBROKEN Angelina Jolie throws her hat in the directing ring. The movie
details the
real life story of Louis Zamperini…son of Italian immigrants and all
around juvenile delinquent. Encouraged by his older brother who sees
Louis has a knack for running, the young man soon leaves his behaving
badly days behind him to be an Olympic champion
in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The
majority of the movie however details how the man literally could not
be broken. First he survives for 47 mind numbing days on a rubber raft
with two other crewmen
when their bomber has to ditch in the Pacific during World War II. Then
after rescue he is continually brutalized by a sadistic commandant at a
POW camp in Japan. This guys willpower and knack for survival is off
any known scale. If it had been me I probably
would have died in the raft like one of his compatriots did before I
even made it to the Japanese prison.
Jolie
does a fine job and for me the highlight of the movie was actually the
first half hour detailing a harrowing combat mission. It’s the first
movie I’ve even
seen that actually makes you feel like you were miles high in the sky
inside a bomber and how dangerous it was when Zeros are making a run at
you. Plus seeing the formation of Allied bombers in the air was more
majestic than any laser guided smart bomb we
use today to take out the bad guys. Great special effects were used
here.
The
movie only fails in that only at one point in the movie do we ever
truly seem to know what Louis is thinking while all this is happening to
him. Way to internalized.
That flaw aside it was a good movie.
Best Scene: The ariel combat in the beginning of the movie.
A.C.’s Rating: Matinee
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