A movie denounced as one-sided by those that are one-sided

Rating: 7/10 (28 February 2012)

I came home in a state of uncomfortable distress after watching this movie. It's been an hour now since it ended and I still can't shake the feeling that awakening the spirits of the Bosnian war in such a gruesome fashion was in bad taste.
However, I also feel the need to address some of the unfounded accusations made against the movie and its director in some of the more politically motivated reviews. In fact, this is my first IMDb review. I registered an account for the purpose of doing this movie justice.
Is the movie one-sided? Depends on what you mean by the term. All war movies are one-sided in a way. No WWII movie depicts the Germans and the allies, or even the Germans and the Soviet, as equally guilty. There's a reason for that. They're not. While both sides in every war are always guilty of cruelty, there is always one side that excels in that department. In WWII that side was clearly the Germans - in the Bosnian war those lines were far more blurred. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that no side was more guilty than the others.
The fact remains that the movie only depicts Serbian crimes, but that is only natural for a movie that takes place in a Serbian prison camp, inside Serbian territory. Imagine if a movie about Auschwitz made a quick jump to a Soviet gulag for the sake of balance! That wouldn't be fair or neutral, it would be perfectly ridiculous! In order for 'In the Land of Blood and Honey' to show Croatian or Muslim crimes, it would have to miraculously float out of the setting into a different place with a different set of characters.
In fact, Angelina Jolie makes a point of allowing her characters to at least verbally describe the other side's atrocities, and makes a (admittedly, relatively tame) attempt at putting some blame on the international union and its response (or lack there of). Rade Serbedzija's monologue about the Hanjar division, which was a predominantly Muslim unit operating within Heinrich Himmler's SS is far more successful. It explains that the innate hatred he has for Muslims didn't come out of 1990s politics - the peoples of ex Yugoslavia have been in wars, civil and otherwise, against one another much before there were cameras to record it.
You may complain about why no movies have been made about the equally horrific Croatian war camps, but that argument really has no place in a review of this movie. 'In the Land of Blood and Honey' may be one-sided from that perspective, but that one side is depicted accurately so there's no room for crying about it.
Another common complaint is the lack of background in the movie. Why did the war happen? Why the hatred? Why the raping? The thing is, this movie wasn't meant to be a war epic and it doesn't make any attempts in that direction. It is a personal story about two people. And maybe, just maybe, you should have some general idea about the biggest military conflict in Europe since WWII without Angelina Jolie talking you through it? The script itself is compelling, but the Serbian translation of some English expressions was quite embarrassing for a movie with such a budget. Surely, they could afford to hire someone would could tell them that the phrase 'I haven't had this much fun in days' doesn't exist in that form in the Serbian language, and that it shouldn't, under any circumstances, be translated literally.
The two main characters are well-defined and realistic, as is Danijel's father, but the people around them are mostly sketches of stereotypical soldier and victim types. This doesn't hurt the movie much, as no other characters are really crucial to the story.
With that said, and the count of real characters low, it is only natural to expect the movie to be packed with events from start to finish. It seems Jolie's intention was to stuff every terrible aspect of the war into 2 hours, and it really doesn't give you any room to relax; no humorous relief, not even the exceptionally dark humor of some other movies about Bosnia. One that comes to mind is Pretty Village Pretty Flame, which is a very good movie in its own right, but looks like a slightly sinister comedy compared to what I watched tonight.
All in all, once you get over the fact that you are not going to be taught a history lesson by this movie, you may begin to see it as a story of two people destroying each other in the midst of a slaughter neither of them understands.
P.S. The 'factual error' on the movie page saying the uniforms Serbian soldiers wear are not authentic, is not really an error. In 1992, there was no 'Serbian army' to speak of, it was the Yugoslav National Army which was commanded from Belgrade. The soldiers wore uniforms with Yugoslav symbols for the simple reason that they didn't have any other uniforms. Later on in the war, that changed, and as the movie progresses, you don't see any more communist insignia on the Serbs' uniforms. In other words, why is everyone so intent on nitpicking about Angelina Jolie's first effort as a director?