Movie lacks focus

Rating: 3/10 (31 January 2015)

Notable as Angelina Jolie's first movie as a director (and also as the screenwriter), this movie fails in many respects.
The movie mainly centers on the life of one woman in the Bosnian war as she is held captive by a soldier who alternately protects her from the severely harsh life as a prisoner and then physically abuses her and kills her kinsmen. Had the movie just focused on this story from her point of view, it may have succeeded. But the movie strays into plot lines of military strategy of the civil war, other prisoners and horrors they face, the politics of the "outside world" ignoring the on-going genocide, and more. Each of those could have also been a successful story, but when combined into a single film, we are left with a jumbled mess of a story all the while relentlessly bombarded with Ms. Jolie's message that "war is bad." Since the atrocities shown are all performed by one side, it is clear that Ms. Jolie is also lecturing us as to who she believes the bad guys are. While I do not expect a Hollywood movie to be the equivalent of a documentary, since Ms. Jolie intended to show more than just the story of the captive woman, she should have (and easily could have) included a little more balance to the political agenda.
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