Has the world gone mad?

Rating: 3/10 (25 November 2008)

8.5 / 10 IMDb points? 66.th best IMDb movie? Many reviewers' favourite movie of all times bar none? Has the world gone quite mad? To me it's a highly forgettable movie. I'm not really addressing those lost souls who actually enjoyed this, to quote Bill Hicks, p. o. s. film, but to warn those impressionable souls who still haven't seen it: beware! Beware this p. o. s. film!
As for the plot, this movie falls roughly into two halves; in the first we follow a contingent of British soldiers in Japanese captivity in Burma during World War II (the one with the funny mustaches). When the dastardly Saito orders the officers to work alongside their regulars -- a breach of the Geneva Convention -- he is faced off by the impeccable colonel Nicholson. Eventually Saito gives in and the British soldiers build him a magnificent railway bridge.
In the second half of the movie we follow an American soldier, Shears, who has managed to escape from Saito's jungle camp. Against his will he is sent back on a secret mission to blow up that very bridge.
At the climax, two men are pitched against each other: Nicholson, to whom the bridge is a symbol of his perseverance and supremacy, and the American, who has gone through hell and back to destroy it and do damage to the Japs.
My major problem with the movie is that colonel Nicholson is obviously a complete idiot. His nemesis Saito may be an evil sadist, but at least he has a weak and human side as well. He is a pudgy little fellow who's been to art school, but now has to make do as a CO. My heart went out to him, whereas I fail to see how anyone can sympathise with the blimpish Nicholson.
It's only after the bridge has been completed that a single officer mildly questions the wisdom of building the most magnificent bridge of all times for the Japanese, who are, after all, not exactly their allies. And I never saw what was so unethical about officers working alongside their troops in the first place.
Apart from that, it's a pretty conventional, John-Wayne-style war movie. The enemy is inscrutable and evil, Asian women are almond-eyed, servile foxes, the soldiers are undyingly loyal and war is hell but fun (in a rough, it's-a-man's-world sort of way). The production is excellent but overall it's a very dated movie. I'm surprised how anyone would consider this a classic rather than just an old movie. Its only benefit is that it allowed director David Lean to make Lawrence Of Arabia.