AVOID.

Rating: 1/10 (11 February 2018)

The timeless contract between director and cinema-goer is to make us care about the movie, to change our thinking in some way, to transport us, to make our lives better. Unbroken does none of these. In some ways, it is similar to Scorsese's Silence, which is two hours of unremitting medieval torture, or Iñárritu's Revenant, which was diCaprio grunting through snow for 2+ hours.
Jolie's Unbroken is a litany of Japanese cruelty and brutality. Up to a certain point, it shows how realistic WWII POW camps were, but this is not a documentary but a movie. It is meant, according to the unspoken contract mentioned above, to take the viewer on a journey, make him care about a character, see a character grow (even despite tremendous adversity), and give the viewer some kind of emotional cathartic satisfaction at the end.
In Unbroken, though, Jolie minimalises any character growth in a rather spartan "show the viewers and let them figure out what is going on" methodology. As a result, Zamperini, our lead character, simply exists from one scene to the next. He does not show any emotional growth arc whatsoever. He simply takes all the multifarious beatings his captors give him as though that were enough. Ms Jolie, it is NOT. We need to see a character move as an active participant in the story, as a maker of events, not a passive recipient.
To put it bluntly, here is the storyline (spoiler alert.)
Zamperini gets captured. He gets beaten often and mistreated. The End.
Sure there is a brief storyboard at the conclusion of the movie which fleshed out the character a little, but it is NOT ENOUGH. I suspect that Ms Jolie believed that the various scenes that she so treasured would trigger the same emotional responses in her audience as her, a sadly mistaken belief. Towards the end of the movie, I was badly needing Zamperini to DO something instead of just accept further beatings. We saw NOTHING of his internal journey, NOTHING of any form of resistance, NOTHING but an endless series of beatings and Watanabe, his tormentor, saying the same things over and over and beating him without any point at all.
The end, when it came, was a glorious relief, and I say that in a negative sense. Count this a failure, Ms Jolie. Do better next time, if there is a next time.