touching fairy tale

Rating: 7/10 (10 September 2001)

This is a good movie indeed, one of those which make you think. The simple fact of being a Spielberg film warned me not to take it too seriously, after all he's always that dream embodier we all knew in his classics... touching little aliens, dire tough sharks, smart dinosaurs brought back to life and so on. Even here we have a stunning portrait of the evil (R.Fiennes really deserved the oscar he didn't get) but the real Amon Goeth had not a home on a hill as we can see, and he was arrested in September 44 by SS, then captured by americans and executed on Sept 46. All in this movie is clearly intended to make you feel dizzy and touched, this is of course not shifty, everyone knows this is a tear-jerker but what everyone seems to ignore is that you need some subterfuges when you aim to involve deeply someone in a story, and Spielberg knows how to do it, he knows it well, he is a master. So, here are the expected germans, shown as either monsters or homicidal robots; a bunch of events of which only the grotesque aspect is fully portrayed and most of all a movie that openly focalize only on jews, giving the impression (the same we get at school) that they are the greatest (or more important) victims of that period, think about people of the former USSR before answering "well...isn't it?". I said it makes you think, personally i had to think when i saw all the comments here in the IMDb about this film, seems people simply accept it without any reservation and with tears in their eyes... the power of being Steven Spielberg! And, most of all, the power of talking about Holocaust! I'm not a negationist, even though i don't accept blindly the classic version of history, and i'm definitely not a nazi-sympathizing, but i don't like hypocrisy and all forms of mass-conditioning, "books say..." "Spielberg says..." and everytime an hysterical and irrational commotion. That was a complicate period, you can't understand it reading a single book or watching a movie, anyway, everyone plays the wiseacre and gives his sentence. After all, i give a good 9/10 for film making, good acting, good directing, good soundtrack, good all; and 5/10 for pretentious politically correct intentions, a nice arithmetical 7/10 and life goes on.