Good material, bad movie

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2015)

A true story is no guarantee for a good movie. That's the lesson we can learn from Angelina Jolie's Unbroken. The movie is based on the biography of Louis Zamperini, an American Olympic track champion who joins WW2 and experiences near death on the ocean and almost gets killed in a Japanese concentration camp. When the war is over, he returns home.
That's the story, frankly. The end credits roll on the screen after he is reunited with his parents and brother on an American airport. No more scenes about being home in the States. Fade out: this is the end.
However, thanks to these end credits we also learn that he later went back to Japan to face and forgive his Japanese camp guards and as an old man sees a dream come true when he carries the torch for the Olympic Games in Japan. Especially the forgiving part is exciting. Why didn't Angelina Jolie show us that? Why didn't she use the Saving Private Ryan structure and tell the story as a flashback, showing Zamperini visiting his Japanese opponents in the present while thinking back of his time during WW2? It would have made the movie much better.
Unbroken is a well made drama. The war scenes with the airplanes in the beginning of the movie are very well done. The flashbacks to his youth as a problem child are also impressive. But once the bad times begin, the movie falls flat. Yes, it's impressive what the real Louis Zamperini had to experience to survive World War 2. But shown from the eyes of director Angelina Jolie it soon becomes pretty boring.
Unbroken is a great monument but a flawed film. With this material Jolie could have done much better.