It could have been amazing but it's just oscar bait.

Rating: 3/10 (25 August 2018)

What I really dislike about this movie is that it I think I was really mislead about what it was. Whether the movie itself, its marketing or just word of mouth is to blame I can't say.
I believed it was meant to be the story of Oskar Schindler saving some Jews. Which I was fine to see. But what I got instead was some candid exhibition of the holocaust with the Schindler plot kind of tacked on for good measure.
I can agree that we should have a really well-made holocaust movie out there but it's the duplicity of the picture that sits unwell with me. The scenes are disconnected and episodic which would have been appropriate if only it could have been established that this experience was the focus of the movie but since there is a pretence of a linear plot that we only get glimpses of they just feel like filler. I barely remember how this thing of saving anyone developed or how he did it. It was really just a marketing gimmick and is in its own right really not that interesting beyond its premise.
Maybe if it had been some kind of hybrid of "Shoah" with "Waltz with Bashir" it really could have been something; with real people relaying their experiences which were then dramatized. But because of the way these episodes are contextualized, they just seem pornographic in the sense it is more about a sadomasochistic voyeurism on this example of genocide, relying way too much on its production values and the gruesomeness of what it is showing so to me it is basically just a slasher than rips off reality. At least "Friday the Thirteenth" tried to be original.
Another design flaw is the film's desperation to show you things to make you recoil. Once you establish crimes against humanity to be on the stakes, the endless parade of candid shootings just seem redundant. It doesn't matter how bluntly they the lady gets shot, the apathy to human lives already blatantly obvious. It's just "what's going to happen? Oh? Another person got shot? Shocking..." This candour is also jarringly contrastive to strangely lyrical dialogues and monologues that make it very unclear what tone the movie really wants.
Powerful moments asides, it's a very sugary experience, and the horror of its subject matter does not excuse the handling. As you can tell from the cover art used on this website. I respect the use of black and white, it's very appropriate and usually the colour against black and white thing would greatly appeal to me, but it focuses on a little girl which is just pandering. The same kind of physiognomy that Nazi Propaganda used. Maybe I'm slow but the point that it was to personalize the impersonal nature of mass killings was lost on me.
Perhaps most insultingly of all, the movie, despite how keenly it fetishizes holocaust imagery, doesn't give any kind of reflection on why the holocaust happened. No one is entirely sure but there is surely something to say about it. It's happy to talk about why people went along with it, but the mentalities of the axis peoples are lacking. That these people don't have more of a presence is a big hole in this movie.
Also, it's in English, which costs it a whole point out of ten from me. It should be in German. I am not German.
As snooty as this must sound, I am inclined to think that this movie was a case of people really falling for a sentimental, well produced collage of an historical even we all like to hold in mind but not really think too carefully about that compromised the art (and the very story it was supposed to tell) for artsiness.