If you can take it, you will make it

Rating: 8/10 (17 January 2015)

So I open up the TA review page for this movie, and almost every review on the first page is really negative... what the heck? If you click through to the scores, you'll see that most people are rating this movie quite highly. Why does IMDb give it 7.2 at the time of writing and why are all these negative reviews being upvoted to the first page? Something strange going on there.
This is a good movie, worth at least about 8/10. It tells the story of a man in extremis (lost at sea and then imprisoned in a brutal Japanese POW camp). All the themes of that genre are explored here. Sh*t happens; sometimes horrible sh*t. Do you accept what life has thrown you or do you heroically battle on? The main thrust of the movie is: will he survive?
But it is also the true story of Louis Zampirelli, apparently a remarkable man, and it is told quite realistically and in harrowing detail. In essence: Louis was an Olympic athlete who became a fighter bombardier in the USAF during WWII. He was lost at sea for almost two months, only to be rescued by the Japanese, who treated their POWS brutally.
Finally, it is the story of a specific war and the reality of Japanese camps. We have lost track over the last generation about the cruelty committed in that theatre, so this is a timely reminder. Some of these men are still alive. I saw the fanaticism of Watanabe as having echoes in today's news. It had me thinking that maybe Jolie was trying to send a message to the US: we have dealt with fanaticism before and won.
I was deeply moved at times.
To me, the movie had an unexpected elegiac, iconic or epic feel to it. I suppose that's to be expected. I noticed the same in Fury (perhaps not accidentally starring Jolie's husband, Brad Pitt). The people who lived through that war are not making movies anymore so we don't see it through their eyes here. The new generation seems to want to show the grim reality of the war but also the heroism of the "Greatest Generation". We are on the edge of losing all the people who fought in that war. It's as if we need to acknowledge their greatness.
Somehow the result comes across as a little artificial to me. We cannot reproduce the earnestness and cinematic style of the 1940s and 1950s. And frankly: isn't heroism dead? "If you can take, you will make it." Does that resonate at all with the internet generation?
One aspect of the movie that bothered me a little: the men who went to that war did not all look like muscular young models. We apparently can no longer find young male actors with ordinary bodies.