Overrated!

Rating: 6/10 (19 September 1999)

It's not that Schindler's List is a bad movie; in parts, it's quite powerful. What has always annoyed me about this film, however, was the way it was so unreservedly embraced by critics and unsophisticated moviegoers. Seriously, am I the only one who was unimpressed by the main ethical point of the movie? Really, what does this film have to say beyond, "the Holocaust was a bad thing?" I'm sorry if I don't consider this to be groundbreaking, cutting-edge historical analysis. Furthermore, am I the only one who was offended that Spielberg made a fundamentally "feel good" movie about the holocaust? Was I the only one that was offended by the fact the film ends by dedicating itself to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust (and about the five million non-Jews who also died you say nothing)? Did anyone else notice how the main characters in Schindler's List were not actually Jewish, thereby following in the grand Hollywood tradition of turning the story of oppressed people into the story of a sympathetic member of the oppressing group (a la Cry Freedom, Mississippi Burning, Beyond Rangoon, and so on)? What really offended me, however, was an issue that, in all fairness, was peripheral to the film itself. I was infuriated by the way Hollywood patted itself on the back for making a movie it hadn't wanted to make, a movie it should have made decades before. Schindler's List was made about forty years too late, and at its core is the same innocuous Hollywood nonsense that has pervaded the world of cinema for far too long. The memory of the members of my family who were murdered during this tragedy deserved better.