The finest study of war to be seen

Rating: 10/10 (2 June 2005)

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is not a war movie. It is a movie about war. As someone who dislikes the typically gory, generic war movies (e.g. Windtalkers, We Were Soldiers) that try to slip a belated message about the horror of war in between explosions, I find this movie to be an absolute masterpiece about how war can only destroy and how it shatters the world for all who fight in it. Alec Guinness (who, I admit, is my favorite actor) won an Oscar for portraying Col. Nicholson, a man who builds the bridge under various pretexts of creating better conditions for his men, a group of British P.O.W.s in Burma. However, his true need is for a feeling of creation amidst the destructive force of World War Two. William Holden is also masterful as Shears, an American concerned primarily with his own survival. The cast is rounded out with a gung-ho British commando, a Japanese colonel obsessed with his own possible death, a younger commando who must cope with his duties that call for the killing of other humans, and one poor medic who plays Cassandra to a world defeated by war. This movie is not about war. It is about humanity and how we may lose it in the currents of war.