US Olympics runner survives WW II crash and POW camp

Rating: 7/10 (24 January 2015)

Louie Zamperini is not broken by an impressive range of challenges: vicious rejection as an Italian immigrant by his schoolmates, his lack of confidence, an unconditionally loving family, a race competitor who tries to trip him, the interruption of his Olympics dream by WW II, a plane crash, 48 days floating in the ocean, the temptation to hog the chocolate ration, the temptation to despair, then torture in a Japanese POW camp. Any one of these could have ruined an ordinary mortal but Louie gets through them all. That's the American immigrant way.
The film uses a WW II survivor for a model lesson how to deal with current war. A period film is always about the time it's made, as much as about the time it's set. Otherwise, why tell THAT story now? It's not named explicitly here, but the current war and temptation to submit is radical Islam -- which means "submission" -- and its intention to destroy Western Civilization and all its freedoms. Louie's repeated lesson — "If you can take it, you can make it."— seems more heartening against the old Axis than against the new ISIS. As the evil commander knows, torturing a third party breaks the will of those who can take torture themselves. The rampant sacrifice of the innocent is what makes Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS so savage.
A postscript adds a second moral. When the war is over forgive your enemies. We're told the real life Louie went back to Japan to make peace with bis captors — and was only refused by the camp commandant The Bird. Initially The Bird sees in Louie a kindred man of strength — and breaks down trying to break him. So the lesser man's refusal later to make peace is predictable. We may expect to see the commander's ceremonial suicide, but instead he skulks off to hide until he's forgiven in a wider amnesty.
The film's most heartening shot is of the real 80-year-old Zamperini running with the torch at the later Tokyo Olympics. All things come to those who survive. Rocky goes to war.
Director Angelina Jolie shows she can direct as well as any man, especially in the opening air battle, the crash and the drawn out suspense in the close-space raft scenes. But in narrative and thematic terms the film retreats from her masterful, more complex and astonishingly neglected earlier war film, In the Land of Blood and Honey (see my separate blog).