Unbroken

Rating: 8/10 (4 January 2015)

As far as movies made into books goes, this one was probably one of the better ones. They did however miss a few things that I would have liked them to pull from the book that they decided to skip. I know that when creating a movie from a book, you just cant fit everything in and with this book you could have easily had a five hour movie. Starting at the beginning I felt they did a good job of showing Louie as a child in the way that he acts and how he butts heads with the law and the other kids. I wish they could have developed his family life a little more but I think we got a good sense from his punishment from his father. Another relationship I wish they would have developed more was between him and his brother Pete. Pete was a big part of how Louie was able to get past his rebellious ways and get into something more constructive. Moving on to the next section of the movie when Louie was in the Armed Forces and again I thought they missed out on a big relationship that was relevant with Phil. Phil and Louie were more than friends, they were brothers and the movie really made Phil just seem like a pilot. I wish they would have shown how bad the Green Hornet really was. Phil made a comment about it in the movie how it was a "parts plane" but that plane was really a piece of junk and it would have been cool so see a quick walk through of the plane before they got on it. Overall the ocean scene was good, a good showing of the depreciation of the human spirit and the efforts to try and renew it. The biggest pet peeve I had with this movie was in the character of Mutsuhiro (Matsuhiro) Watanabe or The Bird. The movie missed a huge opportunity to show how crazy this man really was. They showed a sliver of his true brutality and almost nothing of his mental issues. This man was crazy, he would invite prisoners into his office for tea and would talk books with them and then something would flip in the Bird's head and he would beat the prisoner senseless, then the next day he would apologize to the man. The Bird was just shown in the movie as the bad guy in the movie but they missed on how much of a bad person he really was. Another thing about the Bird that they could have done better on was how much he worked to break Louie's spirit. They did well with the first scene with the two of them but it really seemed to peak there. The last big negative I have about this movie was the scene with the beam. The movie made this scene the climax of the movie and used it as a symbol for defeating the Japanese. We see the emotions on the Birds face and he seems to be defeated when Louie does not fail right away. From what I have read, the Bird did not take this as a personal defeat as the movie showed. Other than those few negatives, I thought this was a well done movie! Another great American war hero gets to has his story told for all the world to hear!