DEFIANCE and ZWICK way off base

Rating: 2/10 (18 January 2009)

Hearing Ed Zwick speak at a recent screening of DEFIANCE, it seems that he thinks he and his partner Clayton Frohman have created a masterpiece. Far from it. What they have done is ruin one of the best true stories ever to come out of World War II. Zwick's Hollywood-ized version of the Bielski Partisan unit is full of stereotypical characters (featuring of course the nebbishy Jewish intellectual, the young revolutionary, etc.) and a host of sugarcoated scenes that defy imagination. It's good to finally see a film about Jewish fighters, but aside from a few action sequences featuring Liev Schreiber, this film is more than lame  it is an affront to all those brave Partisans, who lived through this nightmare.
Viewers who are interested in seeing a true representation of what it was like to slog through the marches should rent the Russian film, COME & SEE which presented this sequence in real time (this sequence is also on Youtube). In Zwick's version, a bunch of central casting extras calmly walk through the Belorussian marches as if they are happily on the Yellow Brick Road. The staginess of Zwick's film is almost laughable, were it not for the fact that this film depicts one of the most important historical chapters of the Partisan movement  how one brave man, Tuvia Bielski managed to save over 1200 innocent men women and children in the forests of Belarussia. Will there be another movie coming out to present this story as it actually happened? Unlikely. Zwick has ruined for all time the chance for this story to told in a truthful way.
Adding insult to injury, Zwick's comments on a recent BBC interview, equating the Partisans with the Palestinians, is shameful and disgraceful. Doesn't Zwick know that the "Palestinians" fought on the side of Hitler? Doesn't he know that the Arabs FOUGHT the Partisans and were part of the "Final Solution"? Doesn't he know that Moslem SS units were responsible for some of the most brutal atrocities carried out against the Jews? One would think Zwick would have done some research before making such despicable statements.
Lets all hope Zwick doesn't get another chance to make another movie where he presents a distorted and sanitized view of historical events and then uses that as a platform to disgrace the very people his film supposedly honors.