Post by daniel on Dec 28, 2014 16:50:12 GMT -5
Unbroken - Review
Angelina Jolie makes her directorial debut with the true-story biopic Unbroken. A story I was previously unfamiliar with, Unbroken is the story of Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini, a runner who was drafted to fight against Japan in World War 2. Opening with the third-highest Christmas Day gross of all-time, Unbroken reminds me a lot of Rudy in that it doesn't have the best of substance, but it has a lot of heart and manages to come through in the end.
Louis' life is presented in flashbacks, his present-day bombing raid interwoven with moments of childhood and then training as he went from being the outsider to a record-breaking runner in the Olympics. When Louis is drafted to fight in World War 2, he undergoes an almost unbelievable amount of unfortunate and then dire circumstances that he fights to survive through. I was originally reluctant to see this since it is a true story and you know he survives in the end, but it did not change the amount of tension throughout the film, mostly due to the fates of others in the film that go through the ordeal alongside him. It was a clever piece of writing to include the men in Louis' life, since their fates would not be known to the average film goer.
What Unbreakable tends to suffer from is inescapable - Louis' journey is a rather sprawling one, something reminiscent of Pearl Harbor in that the scope of three acts is stretched rather thin, mainly due to what Louis goes through. We have the bombing events, then the childhood events, the Olympic events, then suddenly we are dealing with a lost-at-sea movie, then a POW movie reminiscent of Stalag 13 (though much more brutal), then a slave-labor camp before we get to our conclusion. Halfway through the film, the tides and setting are completely turned when a rather cruel and vindictive military authority figure nicknamed "The Bird" enters the scene. His cruelty is played to the extreme, though real-world reports suggest it was not far removed from the truth.
I didn't find that Jolie awkwardly begged the audience for an emotional response, though the climatic scene was oddly reminiscent of the hanging scene from 12 Years a Slave. Still, this wasn't a bad effort from Jolie, especially seeing that she tackled some of the more difficult film elements (war, being lost at sea) quite deftly. In the end, the finality of it all might remind too many of The Pursuit of Happyness, where the struggle is continuous, and then everything wraps up very neatly just at the last minute-mark.
7/10
