Shallow people hopelessly clueless about tough character

Rating: 4/10 (8 January 2015)

Zamperini's story is one of ridiculously bad luck, and unimaginable suffering. And this film is what happens when possibly the most shallow town anywhere crashes into a wall attempting to portray something it doesn't get at a basic level - the hard, gritty toughness of character itself. It's Hollywood's lame idea of tough; not our grandparents'. One review talks about it feeling more like a Hallmark card, and that's bang on the money. This is a movie about suffering brought to you by people whose general idea of hardship is not being able to get their cappuccino in a timely fashion: they simply have no clue, and are giving it their best guess as to what it might be.
The essence of character is what lies in the destitution of hope; what keeps up defiant in the dace of desolation. Being stranded in this is apparently more like a bad summer bootcamp, with a few beatings thrown in to make it look unpleasant; days on end at sea look like being grounded by your parents, with some sharks; not reading radio propaganda is just an ideological-but-patriotic disagreement; and running a few marathons is what makes you not give up. It's feelgood fluff dressed up as as attempted grit, avoiding all those feelings that aren't very nice and wrongly hoping for an award or thirty. There's apparently no disease in the camps with their civic toilets, your family back home are fine, you get to stay athletic and muscly, you even get a nice scenic view, the abuse is a bit of punching, and after all of it, you get a nice refreshing swim in the river.
The two British leads are, of course, top notch - as always. But even their most vicious stares can't quite save direction that's as harmless as their perfectly-styled hair. The cruelty of the Japanese and the misery of passage was on a level hardly any of us can comprehend (Watanabe, a serious war criminal, confessed to getting a "sexual thrill" out of torturing prisoners), where mere survival itself was heroism. Truly depicting it with any degree of realism needs a sense of perpetual exhaustion and powerlessness that seems to never end, with hope being ripped from underneath you time after time - *that* is what is remarkable about Zamperini. What we're left with is the wishful thinking of the writer adapting the book, not the emotional substance of the actual human story.
If you want a better picture of the senseless, genocidal horror these PoWs were thrust into, google for "Unit 731", or the "rape of Nanking". If you're feeling brave, watch "Night and Fog". Any of these will illustrate what a gross insult it is to the Greatest Generation to editorially blunt their stories for the sake of their grandchildrens' emotional "fragility".
We know it will eventually end, and we got to eat through it - they didn't. The study is in what keeps a man defiant despite that, and it doesn't take a filmmaker to sense how phoney the Disney version is. It even ends with cutesy uplifting music, as if it was written to be shown to American teens as some cheesy "don't give up" motivational video: it's a slowly crushing disappointment, unless you're the shallow type who'll pull out a hankie watching the Pearl Harbor credits.
The fact you don't really care about Zamperini enough is the greatest injustice of all of it - because the script continually and cowardly opts out of the reality of suffering. But the saddest damnation of the whole thing is that it's the audience, not the man, who are left unbroken.