survival under severity

Rating: 7/10 (12 April 2015)

I had never heard of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini until he died last year. My dad had read Laura Hillenbrand's book about Zamperini's experiences in a Japanese POW camp, so Zamperini's death caught his attention. But the news that there was a movie about Zamperini's experience getting released caught my attention.
Well, Angelina Jolie's "Unbroken" isn't a great movie, but it's worth seeing. The point is that Zamperini refused to let his captors break him, hence the title. Seeing what the captors did, I got the feeling that anyone in their positions would do the same. War simply breeds cruelty.
The movie's obvious downside is that Jolie probably made the movie with the aim of winning an Oscar. I didn't find the movie Oscar-worthy, and the Academy apparently agreed. In fact, some parts of the movie drug on too long. But I thought that it was a good look at how Zamperini stood strong in a desperate situation. Not a masterpiece, but something that you should. As for Jolie's decision to exclude the part about Zamperini's conversion to Christianity, that wasn't an important part of his survival in the POW camp, and there are a few too many movies in which people's faith "saves" them. The movie is good enough already.