The dumbest David Lean epic

Rating: 2/10 (11 February 2008)

I'm pretty tepid about David Lean's epics. Yes, they're some sort of cinematic development, but the best are a zero sum game (Laurence of Arabia) and others are just unfathomable (Zhivago, Passage to India, this). It's just not enough to go on location and get some pretty footage into a camera. Terence Malick has probably worn out a few copies of this.
What to make of a movie where an hour is killed in a non-cinematic protest about using war prisoners as a workers, only to toss that hard-won development out the window so the movie can actually get rolling..? It's a twist so corny they don't even acknowledge it; and it doesn't result in any decent debate. Everyone here who has an opinion, just takes some half-understood, poorly-argued stance, for which the movie itself offers no supporting evidence. All I take away from it, is that the British are a bizarre race of people; more concerned about afternoon tea than figuring out a coherent moral viewpoint. William Holden's discomfort with the obtuse British is a proxy for my own. They might as well be aliens. Do we really need a British film to demonize the British? Isn't that Hollywood's fulltime job? The movie has already emasculated the soldiers, symbolically by the time it puts one of them in drag in it's hideously belabored last hour.
Every conceivable piece of footage is tossed in to delay the end from arriving. When it finally does arrive ("Oh, give me a break!"), I was imagining about 20 more legitimate ways to structure a movie that needed to get to that big finale, which is the movies sole reason for being. Don't kid yourselves. There is nothing to think about in this movie. Structurally it's mush, making it excruciatingly tedious to sit through. I couldn't even be bothered to look up from my work every once in a while after hour two, to watch the exciting (snooze) mining of the bridge The DVD format is very odd. The movie eats up all its chapters in an hour and half, then it starts 22 more chapters on its own. Have mercy David Lean... or better still, have a point!
I haven't outright hated a movie this much in a long time. This is a giant pile of B.S.