A pointless movie and a waste of time.

Rating: 2/10 (15 March 2011)

Don't waste your time with this movie. If you want to see a good movie about the Holocaust, watch Schindler's List. If you want to watch something for any other reason, pick just about anything else.
The DVD box cover blurb speaks of an inspiring movie about hope. Whoever came up with that never watched the movie. So to spare readers from a wasted hour and a half, here is the plot, if you simply must know.
Boy #1's SS Nazi father is assigned to run a death camp in Germany during WWII. We know his father is evil because he smokes and never hugs anyone. Boy #1 is bored with his new house and his new tutor (whose curriculum consists entirely of 'Thou shalt hate Jews') and wanders off until he finds Boy #2 sitting inside the 'farm' fence. They manage to strike up a friendship without detection despite the Nazi guards that are omnipresent in the rest of the camp and around the commandant's house. Likewise, Boy #1's mother can't keep tabs on her son despite having zero social life or responsibilities. (Just why she doesn't run screaming off into the blue from boredom by the end of the movie is beyond me).
Boy #1 generally eats or loses the food that Boy #2 keeps asking him to bring, but Boy #2 is pretty hard up for friends so they hang out together anyway (as well as they can with an electric barbed wire fence between them). Pathetically naive dialogue is supposed to endear viewers. It doesn't.
Boy #2 is brought to the commandants' house to help prepare for a party, whereupon Boy #1 urges him to stuff his face with the goodies set out. When the Handsome Young Nazi officer catches them, Boy #2 bravely wimps out and says he doesn't know Boy #1 and had just walked in on the scene himself. (Handsome Young Nazi is soon shipped off to the Russian front for not telling anyone his father left for Switzerland four years ago. This, along with Boy #1's mother crying and carrying on when she discovers why those chimneys on the horizon stink so bad, helps show how _stressful_ it is being a Nazi flunkie.) Boy #2 survives his beating and nods when Boy #1 mumbles an empty 'sorry' afterwards. If you're looking for the hope and inspiration at this point, well, so am I. Boy #2 subsequently reports his father is missing (RIP, clueless kiddies), but Boy #1 has bigger news: his mother is taking him away to live elsewhere. He doesn't want to go (playing checkers with Boy #2 being such a thrill and all), so he grabs a shovel and digs his way under the death camp fence to help Boy #1 find his dad. In broad daylight.
Boy #1 and Boy #2 wander the death camp until they enter Boy #2's lodging just in time to be rounded up for the gas chambers. Meanwhile Boy #1's family is turning the house inside out looking for him, eventually following his trail to the fence. Too late. Nazi father screams, mother hears and cries. The end.
Did you miss the hope and inspiration? I did too. This was an atheistic movie without a point. About the closest thing to a spiritual angle is when Boy #1's sister says a prayer on the train ride from Berlin and mother smiles. But that empty expression of Christian faith is painlessly and easily replaced by her energetic embrace of Nazi propaganda from the new tutor (complete with bedroom walls adorned with SS posters). The Bible says "faith without works" is dead, and that is accurately reflected in this movie. No one (including the collaborating Jewish inmates) lifts a finger to oppose the Nazi agenda, unless you count Mom's wailing "I don't wanna live here anymore" when she learns why the 'farm' smoke smells funny.
The Bible warns us to be grounded in our faith and not be blown about by every wind of doctrine. Confidence in his salvation and the rewards of Heaven gave Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand the courage and motivation to share the Gospel and demonstrate love to Nazi and Communist persecutors through years of hellish imprisonment and torture. The example of Wurmbrand and others like him stands in marked contrast to the futile gestures of movies like this one, which offer no reason why a person ought to be good or courageous or hopeful. Let's hope and pray the producers of this movie find real hope and inspiration in Jesus Christ.