Being Something Through Competition and Survival

Rating: 8/10 (15 January 2019)

3 January 2015. There is likely a balance to be struck between reality of a relatively famous person's life and the dramatization of it onto the big screen. Assuredly there might be even more amazing life stories out there and there might be even more captivating ways to selectively develop movie appeal. Yet as a director and executive producer, Angelina Jolie, has produced a film that appears to encompass a balance between real and interest in this movie. The audience is introduced to brief scenes of a young boy who doesn't believe in himself as an Italian in America outcast, to a big brother prodded athletic competitor, to a fearsome World War II experience over the skies of Japan, to lost at sea, and then prisoner of war.
This movie fuses a sports and war theme into a biographical display of endurance and survival. Unbroken brings the intensity of competition as displayed by Francis Osmet's 1913 U.S. Golf Open in The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), the physical and mental torture of Michael Caine in the espionage classic and BAFTA Best Film The Ipcress Files (1965), the struggle of survival of The Life of Pi (2012), Mel Gibson's Golden Globe Best Foreign Picture nominee Apocalypto (2006) or Steven Spielberg's Best Oscar picture Schindler's List (1993). The difficulty faced by Jolie was sustaining the momentum and power of the movie with the different pacing elements without an action-thriller-adventure theme. Instead Jolie faced the difficulty of a biographical sports, sustained survival theme like that faced by Tom Hanks' Golden Globe winner in Cast Away (2000). With what Jolie faced, Unbroken appears almost unscathed in its ability to bring forth this true life, heroic story.