Film Review - Unbroken

Caution, Spoilers!

I had to go to this one on my own. I have been putting it off as there have been several better looking films on for the last few weeks. However, there are 2 much better looking films coming next week (Big Hero 6 and Birdman) so I took the opportunity to go and see this one before it leaves and before I go back to a full work and training schedule. 

So earlier in the week I went to see The Theory of Everything, a biography of a theoretical physicist in a wheelchair, today I went to see Unbroken, a biography about an Olympic finalist, war hero and prisoner of war. You won't need 3 guesses to figure out which was the more exciting film, but you might need 2. 

As with almost all films about running (Prefontaine being the possible exception that proves the rule), the actual running bits are rubbish. Maybe as a runner myself I am overly sensitive to this sort of thing but they really just bug me. Also they feel a bit rushed. There is almost a movie here just doing the pre-war section but it is over with a couple of flashbacks in the first half an hour. 

Then there are a couple of exaggerated flying and crashing scenes before the film just seems to switch off. We must get the best part of 40 minutes of Zamperini and two crew mates in a life raft, seemingly failing miserably at basic survival skills until one of them dies but somehow still lasting 45 days.

It just gets so slow that by the time you get to some of the prisoner of war torture scenes the speed of the film is becoming torture itself. Maybe this was intentional as a directorial decision to try and make the audience uncomfortable. If so then it was entirely successful. The problem with that approach though is that not many viewers are going to the cinema to be made uncomfortable. 

By this point I was also getting a bit frustrated with the cinematography. It ranged from close-ups on the actors to top-down shots which seemed designed to avoid showing modern architecture then back to close-ups, and more close-ups and sometimes more close-ups. This over-reliance puts too much pressure on Jack O'Connells talent and the problem with that approach is that he isn't all that exciting to look at in such repetitive close-up. 

Overall it isn't a bad directorial outing for Angelina Jolie, but given the source material this could have been so much more. 

Rating - 6/10, nothing special, should have been better.