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| Cover of the biography property of Random House Publishing Group. |
Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote last. Sorry about that. Hope you all had a Merry Christmas! I sure did.
During the holiday season there were a lot of topics that I half-heartedly wanted to write about, but none of them drove me to write. This morning I feel driven. It's like an annoying itch that will only go away once I put the words down.
Last night my family and I went to see "Unbroken." Not all of us were very excited to see it, because half of us had read the book, and the reviews were very mixed. Some of us had been wanting to see "Big Hero 6" or "Into the Woods" because their reviews were very very positive. But last night we just really wanted to see ANY movie, and we were all curious enough about "Unbroken" to agree on it and give it a shot.
Maybe it was just my low expectations, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how well-made it was. I assumed the bad reviews were because of bad acting or bad production or something, but I was so wrong. The acting was great, the production value was incredible, and I thought it was very true to the story. It was a longer movie than I expected, and it did a good job of taking the time to show Louis Zamperini surviving his trials during the war.
I recommend it to everyone, though be prepared for some gritty details they kept in. There were a couple things that made my stomach churn. It could have been worse, though. A blow-by-blow adaptation of the book would have been rated R.
So I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was. However, I can see why some reviewers didn't like it, and I do have a foot in their camp.
The ending was such a disappointment. Beware of spoilers if you haven't read the book.
The movie does a brilliant job of showing Louis' war days, from when he's a bombardier to when he survives on the ocean to when he survives the POW camps. And it shows him becoming a great runner and going to the Olympics and all that. All those incidents are, of course, amazing. Louis Zamperini was an incredible person, and what he went through is almost unbelievable.
However, the movie ends when Louis comes home from war. To the average viewer who hadn't read the book, that would seem like an appropriate happy ending for a war-torn hero. But if you have read the book, then you know that coming home from the war was not his ultimate triumph! In fact, Louis was a mess when he came back from war. He had severe post-traumatic stress to the point that he was always yelling at his family, became withdrawn from society, almost ruined his marriage, and sunk into alcoholism for a long time. Yes he was strong and defiant and brave during all this war trials, but when he went home, he actually was pretty broken. So for me, who had read the book, having it end there just made me sad. It didn't give me a triumphant feeling at all.
The triumph of Louis's life was not that he got through the war. It was that he got through the consequences of the war, rose about the alcoholism and the anger and the depression, and actually turned his life over to God. He found peace in his heart through the Atonement, and he learned to forgive the captors who had ruined his life.
The book is one of the most incredible reads of my life. Laura Hillenbrand wrote the most detailed and interesting biography I've ever read, and she made sure that there was that overall theme of Louis rising above challenges and finding God in his life.
Angelina Jolie got the overcoming challenges part down okay, and her directional debut was much better than I expected. But her theme of Louis finding God and learning to forgive was glossed over in a text-on-screen epilogue, like P.S. Louis really did turn to God, but you don't get to see it. Oh and P.P.S. he also met with and forgave his captors, but you don't get to see that either.
Those were the parts I really wanted to see because they were what stunned me the most when I read the book. To have them just tacked onto the end was like a slap in the face.
I wish she had gone either direction--either making it a half hour longer to show us Louis' post-war problems and unbroken attitude in the end (yes, I would have happily sat through despite the fact that it was already a very long movie); or just cutting out the mentions of Louis dedicating his life to God. Obviously I wouldn't have liked it that way, either, but at least it wouldn't have felt so thrown together. Just saying in the end that he became faithful and positive almost confuses the audience, because there was nothing during his war years that showed him turning to God (except for that one time when he thought he was going to die on the ocean, but never again after that).
In conclusion, I really did like this movie. It was an amazing watch, and I recommend it to everybody who's seen the mixed reviews and isn't sure about it. Kudos to Angelina Jolie for doing as well as she did. I look forward to seeing what she'll do next. I just hope that next time she doesn't use a cop-out ending like this one.
However, I recommend reading the book first so that you can really get a feel for who Louis Zamperini was and what his unbroken spirit was really about.
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