Unbroken Movie Review

UNBROKEN

This film is based on real events, during the second world war. It’s telling us a story about the protagonist experiencing extremely hard times, including floating on the sea for over a month, and being a prisoner in the Japanese army. Even so, the movie is still covered in a peaceful atmosphere. The other two movies are both based on normal lives, showing us the struggles of careers.

The story developed slowly, filled with pieces of words that are about god, family and friendship, which have a sharp contrast to the background—war. The character had over 5 comrades at the start, then he gradually lost each one of them through all the disasters—plane crash, starvation on the endless sea, and Japanese army’s cruel torture. The character took us on his journey the whole time, we followed him from the USA, followed him back to his childhood memory.

The director wants to show us the raw cruelty of war and the bravery of soldiers.

The one thing that moved me is the sentence that one prisoner said: the best way to win is to live till our nations’ victory. Because of this belief, all of the prisoners seem to be obeying the commands, although it was not a pleasant thing to do. The version I usually see is: they refuse to obey the commands, and fight against Japanese. If the main character did this, he might have been leading some of his folks, and began a grand escape, out of the camp, and find an American plane.

My own perspective of this film: stories of camp are usually best at sculpting a character, dig for potential power of the humanity, but this film only showed the top layer of the cruelty of World War II, it is long and had little meaning. The movie was supposed to show us how the character changes through torture from time to time, but instead it showed us a Japanese soldier who is overly obsessed with Zamperini. At the beginning part, it started showing pieces of Zamperini’s memory of his childhood, and everything started to become warm, but suddenly this stopped, and turned into a different type of movie as they go into the water, it felt like a survival documentary, but it ended when they landed in Japan. The storyline is really abrupt.

At the beginning of this film, there was a plane fight which reminded me of the movie "Surprising attack Pearl Harbour”. Then the recalling of the naughty Italian boy remined me of “Malena”. After that, the kid’s running reminded me of Forrest Gump. Then the rescuing of comrades-in-arms reminded me of “ Black Hawk Down”. Then the plot began to look like “ Robinson Crusoe”. After they got caught by the Japanese soldiers, it reminded me of “ The Shawshank Redemption” as I thought they would escape from the jail. At last, I realized that it is a biography.