Just My Opinion

Rating: 10/10 (26 July 2003)

POSSIBLE SPOILERS
Schindler's List (1993) Director: Steven Speilberg Starring: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley Screenplay: Steven Zaillian Music: John Williams Cinematography: Janusz Kaminksi Running Time: 195 minutes
It's almost bad taste to call Schindler's List a movie given its documentary style and subject matter but it is a movie and an incredible one at that. We are so used to war movies that depict gun shootouts and heroics on the front line but away from all that is perhaps the TRUE horror of World War II. In 1939 war is declared and Germany defeat the Polish army in two weeks, we know that from a caption that appears in the first 5 minutes but what follows is unexpected and unbelievable. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a member of the Nazi party. He is a confident maybe-arrogant womaniser. He is also a rich businessman, the war has made his fortune thanks to cheap Jewish labour and the black market, he explains to his wife. While the Nazis are on top of the world the Jews have no world left. The most important person to Schindler's factory is Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) his Jewish accountant but his only real friend is the psychotic concentration camp leader Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes). Goeth is evil personified and it is his despicable actions that lead Schindler to save over 1,000 Jews using the one thing he loves most  money. Schindler bribes the Nazis to save his' Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazi's concentration camps. Schindler's List features some of the most powerful images ever put on screen most notably the little girl in the red coat. But there are plenty of others, the children hiding in filth, Nazi soldiers marching into the Ghettos, Goeth in the cellar with Helen Hirsch and the shower water coming down in Auschwitz. For sheer heart rending emotion, watch Oskar Schindler reduced to tears in the arms of Stern, without whom the list would not have been possible. In doing a Holocaust film, Speilberg took a massive career and personal risk but it paid off big style. He worked on this project for over ten years and every single second was worth it. He delivers to us a message that evil can be renounced and survival is possible, it just takes one man. The saying `He who saves one life, saves the world entire' is extraordinarily powerful in its own right. All this and all Speilberg wanted to do, in his own words was to tell an interesting and true story. He did that all right. The story is so amazing it has to be true but this is more than a story, this is the best movie Speilberg has and will ever make, it is also more than likely the best movie anyone will ever make and no one is ever likely to better it. The phenomenal heart-rending power and epic emotion of Schindler's List will never be outdone by anyone, even Speilberg himself.