Where to begin...

Rating: 1/10 (9 April 2014)

I know I might catch a bit of flack for criticizing a movie with such an obviously high production value, so I'll just have to be extremely clear why I am giving this film a one. First, the film is completely historically inaccurate. The books that were on the banned list were books that Hitler considered to be either, Marxist, Communist, or overtly sexual - because Hitler was a man who hated the whoredom that was going on after the treaty of Versailles. Second, there are several songs and speeches from average German citizens about how they were going to wipe out the Jews - this is completely historically inaccurate. People were told that the Jews were spys on the German people and that they needed to be segregated, not wiped out. None of the German people knew anything about the Jews who died in camp due to Typhus or anything of the sort. Now, off the historical inaccuracies, and there were many, I'd like to talk about the plot of the story. The plot was absolutely nothing new. (brief summary/mild spoiler section) A family harbors a German, and people die in bombings... (brief summary over/mild spoiler over) The plot was extremely slow, but worst of all the characters were complete archtypes in every way. Can't we have a single nice SS soldier? Do we have to have an angry German boy who has nothing better to do than spy on every single person and threaten to beat up everybody - don't people realize that even the most evil people need friends? I can't believe a character that just goes around being mean ALL the time and just so happens to be lurking at every moment when he shouldn't be. Come on, people! Finally, this film lies to people rather badly. If there was a single thing that stopped me from giving it a 3 instead of a 1 it was the lying. The film implied that a girl wrote a rather historically inaccurate book and she lived to be 95 etc... but actually the book this film was based on was written in 2005 by a person who knew less about history than the average American (which is saying something). Maybe I am the only person left that doesn't watch period-pieces with a mind solely bent on entertainment, but I find it shocking that people can enjoy this film without bothering to even look up the period and fact check this stuff. Hollywood doesn't care, but I STILL do. 1/10