This movie was an insult

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2012)

What was the motivation behind making this movie?
Was it to teach people about the crimes that the Nazis committed in WWII? Probably not, The Pianist came out in 2002, so there were already hundreds of movies out there that depicted the Holocaust.
In my opinion, if you want to do another Holocaust movie, it should be because of one of two reasons: 1.) You want to tell a really interesting story that happens to be set in this time and location. Or 2.) you want to do a character study. Maybe show both sides of the medal, and try to analyze what could make people do horrible things like this.
The Pianist was neither of those two. The plot is as simple as it gets, a Jewish musician tries not to get killed and to flee from the Nazis. That's pretty much it. So what we get is basically a loosely connected series of scenes, where 1-dimensional Nazis do terrible things to 1-dimensional Jews. It's very important to understand, that there are psychological mechanisms behind what the Germans did in WWII. If you just depict them as flat monsters who just love to do horrible crimes, the viewer just thinks "Yeah well, I could never do stuff like that." Guess what, under the right circumstances, you could. There are two German movies about that subject matter, called "Das Experiment" and "Die Welle". Watch them if you haven't seen them.
The characters being as flat as they are also makes it hard for me to get invested in their fate. Don't call me heartless, I'm just complaining about the way the movie was made, I'm not saying I don't care about the real people this happened to.
And this brings me back to my opening question of why this movie was made, and to what made it an insult for me instead of just a bad movie. The Holocaust is a sensitive issue for many people, so it's not hard to touch something in the viewer by just showing Nazi crimes. And the people who made this movie knew that. The Pianist had "Oscar" written all over it, and because it neither tells an unusual story, nor explores the characters, that's just what the movie is: A cheap way to win everyone involved an Oscar. And they use a horrible event where real people died to do that. That's what makes it insulting for me.
It's competently made, it's not "terrible" to watch or anything, but the circumstances make me hate The Pianist instead of just discarding it as another movie I didn't care for.