Disservice to book

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2005)

As a little background to this review, I did not read "Ghost Soldiers" after I found out this movie was coming out, I read it about 6 months before I discovered the movie was made.
There is nothing in this book that makes me care for any of the characters. The closest I come is to Daniel, the leader of the POWs. There is just no depth whatsoever. I know cinema limits a lot, but I would have stomached an extra half hour of film if it would've made the first hour and a half tolerable. In the book, when the doc dies, it was a huge deal because of the relationships he had forged. In the movie, they mention it as though this death puts the whole movie in perspective, but they didn't establish him at any other part of the movie. Lastly, there was not nearly enough background about the POWs to make us yearn for their rescue. The filmmakers glance over the years they spend in captivity and try and summarize everything with an execution scene. Whatever.
There were other, minor changes that most adapted screenplays make that I'm not going to squabble over. Honestly, by the end of the movie I was looking forward to it ending.