Message of the movie: when life gives you lemons, before you can make lemonade it squeezes the juices into your gaping wound?

Rating: 3/10 (6 April 2009)

I'm usually a sucker for tragedies, but occasionally I see one that just rubs me the wrong way and instead of feeling reflective or inspired by the story I leave just peeved off that the director/writer/whatever dare write a story where something terrible happens to someone that doesn't deserve it. This is one of those. It doesn't make any point other than sometimes really terrible things happen and there's not much you can do about it. Well I don't go to see movies to learn that. I watch the news to learn that. A tragedy is supposed to make the audience see the mistakes of the tragic hero and say to themselves "man what a terrible thing, I will never make those mistakes myself". Either that or the hero sacrifices himself to save someone else. I mean don't get me wrong. I understand that this is a film about a concentration camp in the middle of the holocaust and it is going to be a sad movie. That is not what I am talking about. I'm talking about the fact that there isn't really any hero in the movie at all other than the naive little boy who gets himself killed because his parents and country lied to him about what was really going on in the camp. OK we already know that the Nazis were bad and should be ashamed of what they did. Do we really need a story that exploits that point? I don't know. Maybe I'm the one being naive. Maybe I'm wrong. But honestly at this point I will probably no see this movie again and I will be telling certain people I know who don't even like the kinds of tragedies that I like to avoid this movie.