Edward Zwick Is Not A Skilled Director

Rating: 3/10 (15 September 2010)

There is little to nothing that distinguishes Defiance from every other WWII and Holocaust film I have ever seen. Less than that, in fact. It rips off greater films and offers nothing new to the table.
But the performances in Defiance were worthy of attention. Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber play a pair of brothers who have decided to not be part of the body count left in the wake of the Nazis' decimation. Their performances are strong and come from a pair of actors who have given a lot into their roles. And I would say that most of the actors in this film follow that, in spite of the little characterization given out of the screenplay written by Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick. I refuse to believe that the story from which they based their screenplay had such poor character development. I wanted to know something about the characters who were fighting for their lives, but we got very little of that. And what we did get was unsatisfactory. This was a film that was far more interested in giving the "uplifting message" rather than giving audiences a decent story.
And nothing shows that more than the extremely obvious similarities between this film and Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, two vastly superior films. There is even a moment during one of the battle scenes in which the commanding character has a bomb go off by his head and the film starts going in slow motion. That scene is almost a shot-by-shot rip off of Saving Private Ryan.
The one part of the film that truly impressed me was the music. I loved the soundtrack of this film. The music was easily the best part of the movie, and I wish the rest had matched that. But it didn't. Director Edward Zwick is not a skilled director. When he is not stealing material from Steven Spielberg's films, he is taking inspirational speech scenes directly from Braveheart, even putting in the extra effort in allowing the commander to ride a horse during the speech, even though I'm pretty sure the character does not ride the horse for the rest of the picture.
Does Defiance have anything to offer audiences? Not in the slightest. Are there qualities of this movie worthy of attention? Not really. Does this movie do anything to truly make itself its own film with its own story? Unsatisfactorily, no.
3/10