Nothing redeeming about this drivel...

Rating: 3/10 (28 May 2003)

Having read a fair amount about the Warsaw Ghetto, this movie seemed to trivialize it to me. I know that I am not stating a popular opinion, but I found that this film, which put so little into character development and so much into plot, was a failure. *We already know the plot*. So what is the point of the film? Nothing, in my opinion, it adds nothing to what has already been established, and pales in comparison to reading memoirs from the people who were there. Even in terms of plot, there are jagged edges in this film and it is generally an unsmooth and uninteresting ride through material that has been covered ad infinitum by better writers. Rarely have I been this bored in a movie. The violence, I felt, was extremely Hollywood--it was meant to portray the evil Germans against the good Jews. Not that I am a Nazi, but such a ridiculous simplification annoys me. More interesting is how an entire nation (Germany) could allow this to happen--a point which goes entirely unaddressed as we watch three hours of another Jew in another awful situation. A member of the Einsatzgruppen who was killing the Jews was as much a person as Szpilman, with emotions and responses just like his. The fact that they are destroying other humans does not mean that they themselves are not human, although this fact is ignored in this movie and others by portraying them as monsters. Isn't there some psychological (and as a result, cinematic) ground to break here? I feel that most people are familiar with the experience of the Jews--if we must revisit this part of history again, why not try it in a different way? I hope I don't offend anyone with these comments, because I don't mean to marginalize the suffering that happened, but I feel that with distance we get clarity about a situation. Since no large group (to my limited knowledge of the world) still misunderstands the holocaust, this type of emotional drivel is pointless and gets the public riled up over something long dead, without adding anything new whatsoever.