Too preachy, powerful stuff swaddled, over-mothered, but worth seeing

Rating: 6/10 (3 December 2014)

Powerful sequences of war and prison camp captivity, with gripping performances of human good and evil, high-minded, but with insufficient trust in the audience, or in the material, or even ultimately in humanity, and consequently much too heavy a hand on the moral eye-liner, so intent on spelling out the lessons that the visceral power of the actual events is watered down and scumbled in Sunday school pieties.
The film begins very powerfully with us, the camera, in a propeller bomber on a run against Japanese military installations, and just as we start to enjoy the personable young crew hell breaks loose with anti-aircraft flak bursting around us and wasplike Zero Japanese fighters zooming circles around our slow bomber, strafing thru our plane's thin walls w their heavy machine guns, ripping into our machinery and men's bodies w/o warning.
But this exciting, frightening, gripping reality is soon undermined by the directorial decision to spell out the character of the hero through an slew of flashbacks to his early life, starting w a sermon he seemed hardly to be paying attention on the text "love your enemies", going into his loving immigrant family, and the lessons learnt from mentors as he built himself into an Olympic distance runner. All of which might be quality material if subjected to critical analysis in a different movie, an intellectual meditation, but is just empty calories on the superficial level purveyed here, and, most importantly does not at all belong in this film of war and imprisonment, where whatever transcendence and redemption there is manifests itself only through the various courage and fortitude of men to soldier on through vicious and brutal reality, or to give over to the deadly despair or vicious sadism of inner demons and frailty.
Apparently a first directorial effort, fresh ideas, good instincts for performances, but so focused on expressing herself clearly as to blind herself to what the audience is experiencing given what we bring to the film, and so she presses too hard anxiously making sure every theme and motif is spelled out over and over again, until the audience is being drilled in a lesson rather than given the free, open, aesthetic experience needed to evoke pity and terror, profound emotion and illumination.
"Unbroken" is worth seeing for its strong presentation of the ignored dimensions of our humanity in war, brutal captivity, cruelty, and extraordinary strength But it could have been (and might still be?) made into a great film with the necessary editing, something along the lines of what Pound did for Eliot, ripping out all the Sunday-school blather and letting the facts speak for themselves.
Hopefully, Ms Jolie will take a tip from Picasso who defined his artistic process as a sum of destructions, removing from the canvas everything that could be removed, until what was left was the painting.